Episode 369: Your Flight School is STEALING YOUR $$$
22 Nov 2025 · 2 min
Kenny Keller argues for one-hour flight lessons based on 23 years of instruction—claiming learning quality drops after about an hour—and shares an anecdote where a student stopped at ~40 minutes to avoid wasting money. He also promotes his co-authored book "Top 10 Checkride Tips," references a free PDF, and announces a Las Vegas book signing on November 11, 2024.
Chapters
The one hour flight lesson. This is something that I've talked about in the last 13 years of making videos probably 20 times or 30 or 40, and I'm going to cover it again real quick. Something I learned as a new instructor. First school I went, went to work at, the owner of the company said, hey, you know what? The one hour flight lesson works really well because the first 20 minutes you're warming up. Second 20 minutes you're really learning. In that third 20 minutes you start to go downhill. I've witnessed that over the past 23 years since I've been teaching. Person just gets tired and he was exactly right. They're getting warmed up, start doing really well, and toward the end of that hour, you start to drop off. If you go past that hour, it seems like each approach you try to do or whatever you're working on will just continually get worse. So I'm a firm believer in the one hour flight lesson. And if you're at a flight school and you're new and they're flying you 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, they're stealing your money. They're just trying to pay the helicopter bills. You are not learning much after that hour. I'm a firm, firm believer in that. Member here right now is flying with Chris today, and she's doing a flight in the morning and the flight in the afternoon. They did their one hour this morning. We had a nice lunch, did a little ground, and they went out at about 40 minutes. She said, you know what, Chris, I've had enough. And he said, okay, then let's go in. Let's not spend any more of your money today. Because their first lesson in the morning was good, but she was a little bit tired. She just traveled yesterday and it makes complete sense. So rather than stealing her money, we just said, that's, that's fine, let's just call today. If you want to do a little ground, we can do that. But she herself realized at 40 minutes, that was just enough. So another reason why that one hour flight lesson is super important. That's a tip From Private Pilot 101 Helicopter Training Blueprint. You can get a free PDF down below that. And also down below, we're having a book signing. On this book, Top 10 Checkride Tips. Dan, Taz Christman and I put this together. Amazon number one bestseller. We're doing a book signing in Vegas, November 11, 2024. Aircraft's getting ready to go to head, head to Vegas very shortly. We got three more check rides this month. Then we've got people to start training down in Vegas, so go down below to get a copy of that for free. And stay tuned for details on where and what time that book signing will be. If you'd like to join us for the book signing and get a copy and have Taz and I sign them, you'll want to meet us there. So go down below for those links and see you next video. Peace out.
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