Episode 434: “Stuck at 170 Hours: The Flight School Trap”

Welcome back to 30 checkrides, 30 lessons. Today we're talking about one of the most common frustrations in flight training. Being stuck in a flight school, in the line at a flight school that's overbooked and under resourced. And this comes from our second of the facs that we've done. So this is still back to the beginning. And the young man in this video, his name is Cameron, or the young man we're going to talk about. Good kid, very likable. He was smart, his flying was good. The really only problem was he had, and I don't remember the exact number, it's been two and a half years, but around, I think 160 hours or something, he had a lot of hours. So when he saw one of our Instagram ads when we first got the R44, and we're saying, hey, are you tired of getting countless hours? And you're just not to the checkride, but you got your requirements done, Come here and let us finish you. So the first thing we had was parents hesitation a little bit. His parents were helping him. He's a young kid. And the first thing from his mother, when we zoomed with his mother, I'd already had a zoom with him and I knew his knowledge was really, really good. And she's like, well, but look at the money we've spent. You know, I spent all this money and now I'm looking to spend another 5,000 or whatever to come to you. And I said, well, you have to look at the fact that, you know, if you do a simple math, let's just say 300 an hour for 160 hours is like four, $48,000. So she had a significant investment in his training. And again, he's another one that he liked the flight school, he liked his instructors. He didn't have a problem with the people or even the quality of training. It was just that he couldn't get on the schedule. He was always waiting and waiting. And they had several helicopters, but one or two were down. One was maybe in an overhaul, and the other one had some kind of a big major problem. So they had this load of students and he just couldn't get on the schedule enough to keep the frequency of flying. So his stage checks would run out and they say, oh, well, now you need another stage check. And the vicious cycle goes on when you have a flight school. Too many students and not enough instructors and not enough aircraft to keep everybody going. So that was her first hesitation. Then the other one, she said, well, if he comes to you to finish, then is he going to be able to go back and do his flight training at that same flight school? Are they going to be upset? And I said, well, you know, if that flight school is going to be upset with him when he comes back, then that is on them. Number one, on, it's on them that they couldn't get the training done in a reasonable amount of time. Number two, it's on them. If they want to treat somebody that way, when they come back, they should be happy. He's one of three that we took care of where they just come up, do a few hours with us, we finish them off, send them to the checkride, they can go back and work on their next rating. And our examiner at the time, once we started doing this, our examiner's like, why doesn't that flight school just work together with you? You know, help them get their requirements and get close and then send them to you to finish up? That could actually be a great deal. Anyway, point being, you know, looking at the money, the money that she'd already spent, it's just a portion to get finished up. And if you just would have stayed at that school, how much longer would that have taken? And again, flight schools, in my opinion, should welcome you to go fly somewhere else. When I was going through my training early on, I flew Enstrom, I flew Schweitzer, I flew Robinson. And when I'd say, hey, I'm gonna go check out the go fly the instrument, I want to go fly the Robinson, My instructor was always like, oh, that's cool. That's a great idea to go fly different places, different instructors, different aircraft. And if a flight school is going to give you that attitude that, well, you went and flew over there, well, you know, you're the customer. They're, they're there to take care of you. There shouldn't be any stipulation that you can't go flying anywhere else. I just don't think that that is even smart. So we are finding in the last 30 months of these 30 check rides, I'm trying to think of a number of people had over 100 hours. And this is nothing against somebody having a lot of time. Some people can afford it and just want to fly the extra time. But for somebody on a budget who wants to go on through instrument and commercial and become a CFI and get out there in the working world, you know, that's a struggle. If it's taking you that long to get through the private, it's going to take years. And the amount of money to get through all your ratings when the flight school can't get you done in a reasonable time just gets ridiculous. So. And I also saw Access, actually had to explain to his mother, like, hey, look, here's the thing. You know what you've been dealing with, you know what you've spent that's on the flight school, that's on them. When he comes up here with us, it's only going to be for five days. It's going to be arrive on Monday, take a check right on Friday, and he's going to be with us all day, every day until the checkride is done. So it's not like the battle you're having right now in Florida where he can't get on the schedule for two to three weeks at a time because it's so booked. He's coming here to get all day every day, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Take the check ride and go home. So this is something common that we're seeing. It's happening a lot. And the problems are, you know, they're varied. A flight school doesn't have an examiner in the moment, examiners out for a medical reason. This happens quite a bit. I recently saw an interesting thing where, you know, they say there's not enough examiners. I saw an interview with a couple of DPEs that said, you know, if more people were passing their check right on the first attempt, there would be more examiners available. And this is a problem. A lot of people showing up unprepared and then the examiner has to fail them on the checkride, so then you have to reschedule. And apparently from what this interview I watched with these two examiners, they said they're dealing with a lot. They're dealing with a lot of people showing up unprepared, not qualified, and ended up failing checkrides. So that's another, you know, thing that's happening out there. Our examiners will tell you that they'll. We have two that we've used in the, in the past, and they both say it's not hard to find somebody to fail because there's so many people showing up that really aren't unprepared. And according to these examiners, the big problem is usually the larger schools where there's just so many people trying to get through and they spend so much time and then they rush people through when it comes to checkride time and, and they're not being thorough enough. We just had a CFI add on. We did or not add on. Well, we just recently had a double eye and fixed wing, does private add on. And we're having a nice discussion. He goes, there's no magic to it. And I go, you know what? I like you said that there really isn't any magic to it. The problem is instructor is not using the acs, not going through the far aim. And we're going to talk about this in some of these other videos coming up because we've got some of these same issues that pop up over and over with endorsements and requirements and things not being covered correctly, not signed off correctly. And we're going to cover those. So there's what the final approach course is all about is getting you in here and getting you done. So if you're out there and you've got 100 hours, you've got 120 hours, or you've got 80 hours, doesn't matter if you feel like you're just. You can't get it put together again. It can be examiners, it can be aircraft down, it can be instructors leaving. This is very often that somebody's left sitting at a flight school because the instructor just left go to another job. That is part of being a pilot. And that's part of what instructors do. They build their time and they move on to the next job. And that's a constant flow of people changing. And a lot of times somebody will come here and I'll go, man, I've had like eight instructors. Because every couple months, instructor gets his time and he leaves. That's just a common, that's just a common thing that happens in our industry. So with us here, you've got me, you've got Hauser, you got Hunter. We're not going anywhere. Hunter or Hauser and I have enough time that we can get whatever kind of job we want. So this is what we're doing. This is what we like to do. Hauser flies corporate full time and helps us. And Hunter's a deputy and comes up here in his days off to help as well. So stay tuned. I'm not sure what's coming up next tomorrow. I did this at home today just because I didn't feel like going to the airport. If you're interested, reach out to Heather 574-767-1797. And we also have a free resource for you. Askhogs.com it's gaining more and more popularity. Fourteen years of my contents piped into our clone or my clone@askhogs.com you can go there. It's free 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We've even added it to our online courses. So each video inside the course has the AI there for you below the video. So you can go through, watch videos and if you have a question, you can ask the clone in real time and get an answer from 14 years of my content that's piped in there. Blogs, podcast, paid content, free YouTube stuff, everything we do gets piped into that clone. Absolutely everything we do. So there's over 6 million words right now in the clone of training that we've been doing for the last, you know, 14 years. So you can check that out. Ask Hogs.com I'll put that link down below the video along with helicopterground.com where you can set up for any of our online courses. Private commercial instrument, CFI. The monthly options, you get a 24 hour test flight, cost you nothing. And then you have a 30, 30 day money back guarantee on top of that. And you can cancel anytime and you can come back anytime as many times as needed. And we have people do that quite frequently. So do us a favor, subscribe the channel, click that little bell, you'll be notified of the 28 more tips that we're going to come out and talk about things that we're seeing that are happening currently in the helicopter training world with getting check rides done, the problems that we see and the things that are continually coming up. So we can help you avoid some of these issues on your checkride by letting you know, hey, here's what to watch out for and here's a solution if this is the problem that you're looking at. All right, we'll see you next video. Peace out.