Episode 438: Tail Rotor Failure: The Bad Lesson That Fails Students

You're flying along at 70 knots. We're going to use R44 for an example and all of a sudden big bang happens. Nose goes to the right, we just lost the tail rotor. What do you do? At least three people of the last 30 we're doing 30 days of what we've seen in 30 checkrides over the last 30 months. At least three people over a zoom before coming here. I always ask this. At least three people started telling me, well I can. And as soon as they start going like they're telling me they're going to do something with the throttle and they're going to start manipulating the nose. I go wrong, you just failed the checkride. And then they try to argue with me and tell me, well, my instructor taught me well. So your instructor is going to not use the PoH, the pilot's operating handbook, where it says immediately enter auto rotation. This is being taught out there and I've been hearing this over the years many times and I don't know where this is coming from and who's teaching it. If the PoH clearly states immediately enter auto rotation, that's what you do. You can't make up your own emergency procedure. Well, my instructor taught me I can manipulate the nose with the throttle and I could continue flight home to my airport. You just lost a tail rotor, you busted a drive shaft. Something major just went on back here. Are you seriously going to continue flight by manipulating the nose with the throttle and try to make it to your home airport? If you think through it, that's really. And not a very smart choice. So clearly stated in the poh. And I know instrument says the same thing, immediately enter auto rotation. And I can remember years ago our examiner talking about this one in particular and he said, look, you need, in an emergency, you need a clear cut decision on what you're going to do. Using things like, well, I'm going to do this and I'm going to kind of try to manipulate. And he said, not in a tail rotor failure, if the tow rotor is gone, the drive shafts broke, the tail rotor blades flew off, gearbox is shot. Whatever happened, you're going to continue to do more damage as you continue flight. On top of the fact that the PoH says immediately enter auto rotation. Now maybe where people get confused on this, it does say if you go down further, immediately enter auto rotation, maintain at least 70 knots of practical, select landing site, roll throttle and over travel spring and perform auto rotation landing. There is a note, when a suitable landing site is not available, the vertical Stabilizers may permit limited controlled flight at low power settings and airspeeds above 70 knots. However, prior to using airspeed, enter full auto rotation. So it's telling you to enter the auto rotation. Look for your spot. So yes, if, let's say you're over a thick wooded area, but you can see a quarter mile of ahead, ahead there's an open field or a parking lot or something like that. Okay, you could pull the power back in and you could fly till you get to that point and then it's reenter out of rotation all the way to the ground. And I've had people and over zoom again. This is one of the first things I ask them because I know that this is a failure with our examiner. That's 100% failure. And it's interesting how they want to argue with me a lot of the time. And I'm like, do you have a POH handy? Because open it up and I know exactly what the first line is. Immediately enter on rotation. They'll kind of scratch their head. And are you sure? And I'm like, yeah, I'm sure. I know what it says. I've read it enough times. And out of 25 years of doing check rides, I know what the. I know what the POH says. If you don't know what we're doing. I mentioned earlier in the video, we're just going to going through things that we've seen in the last 30 months. We've had the R44 for 30 months now. We started what we call the final approach course. We're helping people from around the country finish up a rating. And the reason is, it can be a lot of reasons. It could be, oh, their examiner's out because of a medical issue, or my instructor just left for another job. They're looking for another instructor. They got two helicopters, but they're both down for maintenance, which happens. You know, everybody says, oh, get a backup helicopter. Well, guess what? They always break at the same time. So you get a backup and then it breaks as well. Or another big, long list of reasons why somebody has gone through their training, they got their requirements done, and for whatever reason just keeps getting drug out. They can't get a checkride done. We've been using the Same examiner for 25 years. He does us a favor and works us in as soon as he can. When we have somebody, we do a zoom with you before you come out. Make sure your knowledge is where it's at. In the event your knowledge isn't quite there, we delay getting you on the schedule we have you do some more ground training and then get back with us. And when I'm confident that you can show up and in a few days finish this thing up, we put you on the schedule and get you out here. So that's what the final approach course is. We do have as of this time, we're beginning of October. Got a pretty open schedule at the moment. So if you're stuck out there, and I know the people are out there because they've been coming for the last 30 months. 30 people have come here. They've all left happy. And everybody had a story. Everybody had a reason why they just couldn't get finished up. Let's mention John. Lindsay can throw a picture of John. John was a lot of fun and he traveled out here with his wife, I think came from Texas. R44 owner did a great job. And this was kind of. It's kind of funny. It's just kind of comical. His Far Aim was expired. And this happens a lot. Here's another. We're throwing another one for today. Here's what people do. They have their Far Aim all tabbed up, you know, all these nice neat tabs and it's all pretty. So they don't want to. They don't want to. They don't want to update when the year changes. So I've had probably at least three people. Again, that number three that keeps popping up. I bet we've had at least three people show up in the last three check rides where they had the previous year Far Aim manual all tabbed up. And I'm like, is that what you're going to use for the check ride Friday? And they're like, well, yeah. I'm like, you can't use an expired Far Aim on a checkride. They're like, why not? I go, because it's expired. You can't use any kind of expired chart Far aim. You cannot take expired things to a checkride. So again, something small. And with John, it was kind of fun because he was. He was kind of aggravated. I'm like, dude, you can't use that. He's like, I just got done tabbing all that. And I'm like, well, you should have tabbed up a new fire aim, not last year's firing. And his wife was happened to be here that day and I had a new one. And I go, you know what? Here, just use mine and you can move the tabs over. And he's like, I'm not going to do that. And his wife actually said, Just give it to me and I'll do it tonight at the hotel. So I had a new fire aim I just gave to him. Let him use it and let him move the tabs over. That's a good little tip there on. You can't show up with expired stuff for your checkride. And other than that, John's checkride was great, super fun to work with. Him and his wife were both awesome and he was. Had a great checkride other than wanting to try to use an expired firing for the. For the checkride. So that's another good one. Free downloads. You know what we haven't talked about in a while is the maneuver guide. We have a maneuver guide. We'll put that link down below for the maneuvers based off the Helicopter Flying Handbook. Just a simple PDF you can download and look through and ask hogs.com we've been talking about this every day, but we're going to keep pushing it because we're in the world of AI now. And we developed RA over a year ago and a half ago. We created an AI for Hogs and we call it Kenny's clone because it has 14 years of my content. 14 years. Blogs, podcasts, videos, paid content, YouTube content. Everything is piped in there like the series of videos we're doing now. We pipe it to the clone every day because this is a lot of good info that we're putting out that's relative to what's going on in the world now and what's going on in checkrides. So all that information, everything we do, everything electronically gets uploaded to the clone. So that's available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We'll put a link down below for ask hogs.com and we've added it to our site to each of the videos. And we just had a. I need to look up his name so I can mention him in an email and I'll do that, maybe the next video. But we have a young man that's in now in Private pilot and he emailed me, say, Kenny, I wanted to let you know that as I'm going through the private pilot videos, I love the fact that you have your clone there below each video because I can watch the videos and then if I have a question, I can just ask your clone. Ask your clone. And he said, I've been getting some really, really, really good answers and I'd say 99% of the time the clone is dead on. And it gives some wonderful, really, really good info on almost anything you ask. It related to helicopter flight and or ground training. So that's now installed inside our site and hey, we got another one we haven't talked about yet. Heather just watched a update video from our company that does our online site. Pretty soon we're gonna have the ability to have our videos available in a number of different languages. Somebody just the other day made a comment, hey, why don't you do your videos in Spanish? And I said, well, hang on, because it's coming. So there's something else new that we'll be working on soon is you'll be able to view our online ground school videos in different languages. So hopefully we'll see that up and running soon. Put your comments down below. Do us a favor, subscribe to the channel. Click that little bell, little bell so you'll know the other videos we have coming up. Again, we're just taking little bits and pieces, things that can be helpful for you. And most of these things just like the the tip today on the auto rotation, multiple people have the same issue many, many times. So we're pointing out things that are common, things that you'll see, things that trip up, check rides, hopefully to help save you some headache and heartache. All right, I'll see you tomorrow in the next video. Peace out.

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