Kenny Keller (Helicopterground.com) presents a refreshed CFI section of Helicopter Online Ground School (HOGS). He summarizes recent experience—training and exam insight from flying an R44 (nine checkrides this year, five were CFI checkrides)—and warns that examiners are focusing more on the Fundamentals of Instruction (FOIs). He reintroduces the "No Go" decision button (a physical token HOGS sends to flight schools to encourage conservative go/no-go choices), shares an EMS anecdote behind the idea, and explains affiliate opportunities (50% commission, dashboard tracking, PayPal needed). He also advises avoiding study overload and relying primarily on FAA publications for CFI prep.
Questions this video answers
Nine checkrides this year; five of those were CFI checkrides.
50% commission on sales through the affiliate link.
A PayPal account is required.
Live to fly another day.
Helicopterground.com welcome future certified flight instructor. That's why you're here, right? Welcome to the new HOG certified flight instructor section. Doing a big major upgrade here. So we opened up with a couple of flying videos just to kind of get you flowing. Wanted to relay a lot of the things around my mind from doing a bunch of recent check rides. We've been flying the R44 this year and I've done nine checkrides and five of those were CFIs, just all in the last several months. So I'm pretty up on, you know, what's going on now, right? And as I mentioned in the first video, examiner is telling me the first one I went to send this year, he said applicants are weak on the FOIs. And then he told me through discussions there it's not just they're showing up weak. He said the FAA is really pushing examiners right now to focus more heavily on the fois. So we're going to get to that section, we're going to do some upgrades to that as well. For you, the fois, we know it's dry, boring stuff. You got to get through it. So one thing I do want to mention before I go any further is one of my CFI applicants was here this summer. He did a good job. He used hogs before showing up. And then when I gave him the no go button, he went, well, what's that? I'm like, you haven't seen the no go button? And he goes, no, I've been through your training, but it wasn't in there. And because the CFI course was older at that time, it was nothing in there. So if you're new to HOGS and coming in as a CFI member, when you pass your checkride, we send you a no go button. Right? There it is. And this is to help teach people about the no go decision. And now as an instructor, this is going to be big for you, right? You're going to need to install in these future private pilots that you're going to be working with and advanced pilots to make good decisions. And I'll tell the story quick. When I was flying ems, I was flying with a Vietnam era guy. I'm going to grab another button over here. I'll keep talking though. When you're in the EMS environment, along with many other conversion commercial environments, maybe you've been flying as a commercial pilot and you already know this or maybe you're going right from commercial to cfi, but you get a lot of pressures from companies you work for hospitals, whatever the case is. Pressure to fly, right? So in ems he had the staples easy button sitting on the desk and when he would turn down a flight due to weather, he would go. That was easy. And that helped take the pressure right off, right? Because you're trying to make these decisions and then you're second guessing yourself. And I was new to EMS and he was being the Vietnam era guy's like, Kenny, don't second guess yourself. Make the decision to not go and move on with your day. And so I took that idea of seeing him hit the easy button and created the no go button.
Live to fly another day.
Helicopterground.com so we will send one of these to your flight school. If you're working at a flight school or when you get to your flight school, well, you'll be at a flight school. Now if you'll display this in your flight school, promise me it's going to be where students are going to be able to see it and talk about it and hit the button when they're making the no go decisions. We'll send this to your flight school. And I also want to mention, never mentioned before in the CFI course, as the cfi, we know that you're eating ramen noodle noom ramen noodles probably and driving a piece of shit car, right? A lot of you are driving old beat up cars because. Because the flight training, so dang expensive, you can't hardly afford to eat or drive anything nice. We get that Hogs has affiliate commissions so you can make 50% by referring fellow students, your students. Sign up anybody. I'll put a link down below. If you want to become an affiliate, you can make 50% of the sales. We're sending out thousands of dollars a month to people who are just using our affiliate link to get somebody to sign up. You're using the product now. So if you believe in the product, you sign up with that affiliate link and you'll earn 50%. And you have your own little dashboard that tells you exactly who signs up, how long they stay, and you'll know exactly the money that will be coming to you each month. You do need a PayPal account though. I want to talk about Ease in the overwhelm. That's the video I'm replacing right now. That video was like 8 years old. The story is still the same and still valid. When I was training for cfi, two of us training together. His name was Kenneth. Also. He was like K1. I was K2. We were working with our chief pilot at the flight school that we flew at to prepare for the cfi. And we actually, both of us actually went to California and we both finished with Tim Tucker from Robinson actually, in the end. But the gentleman that was prepping us was at that time our chief pilot for a local company. This was back in the late 90s. He now works for the FAA, and I've seen him to. To thank him for what I'm about to tell you, we go in to work with him and we had all. We had mounds of books, we had printouts stacked this high, and we had all this stuff. And of course, we were overwhelmed. We had our heads up our rear ends and, you know, we come walking with all this stuff. And the chief pilot goes, you guys have way too much stuff. And we were like, what? We thought this was the way it was supposed to be, right? We were almost offended. And I'm telling you, we had stacks, just ungodly amount of stuff. And he said, guys, you need to tone this down a little bit. You're completely overwhelming yourselves. So let's go through the basics of what you're going to need. I'm not going to hit exactly everything that you may want or you may need, but I'm going to give you the basics. So just moving forward, be careful about overload. Getting too many different resources and especially resources that aren't FAA publications. Because you as the certified flight instructor and you're going to this checkride, everything you want to be studying and using as a reference should be an FAA publication, right? Because that's how you're going to get through the checkride. Some guy that wrote some book, you know, even me, you know, it could be my book. Well, who cares about Kenny Keller? What the examiner cares about is what does the FAA say when you feel.
The pressure to fly, but know the right decision is to stay on the ground? Hit the hogs. No, go and live to fly another day. Helicopterground.com gum.
