Episode 441: Commercial Rating Confusion: The 5-Hour Instrument Time Requirement

So we have a tip in this video for those of you going for commercial. And I want to point out something to you that you as the applicant, you need to understand in case your instructor doesn't quite understand this. And what I'm going to show you with the whiteboard here in just a second is when you are doing that five hours of instrument time for your commercial. And now we're talking about initial commercial. And we're not saying you have an instrument rating. This is you have no instrument time, but you need five hours for your commercial training. It's got to be from a cfi. And I'm going to give you an idea of what it should look like. All right, Crude example here. I'm talking about, so make believe. This is two separate logbooks here. In this logbook we have a column for instrument time and total time for each flight. So just to make the math simple, let's say you go out there and you do an hour of what you're calling an hour of instrument time comes out to five hours. The total flight, each flight is 1.0. So you got five hours of instrument time. Five hours of flight time. That is going to raise an eyebrow. Eyebrow for at least some examiners. It's definitely a problem with our examiner. So you should be looking at this as the pilot working on your commercial. And instructor should be looking at this, too. So, applicant, you might have to call out your instructor on this if they don't understand this. This is what it should look like because you have to climb in the helicopter, do a startup, do a takeoff, then you put on your foggles or your Icarus device or whatever you're using for the instrument training. So more realistically, you'd have maybe 0.9 instrument. The total flight, 1.2. And again, I'm just making up random numbers, but 1.0 on a flight, 1.3 for total flight, or I'm sorry, 1 for the instrument, 1.3 for total. Because you're not logging instrument time from the time you get in and do your checklist and do your startup. That's just not reasonable. And you're not using. Shouldn't be, be most likely using foggles when you're on the ground shutting down. So again, our examiner would look at this and this would be a problem. So just keep this in mind when you're logging that five hours of instrument towards the commercial. It needs to look more like this and it needs to be from a certified flight instructor. We had somebody show up. He did his five hours with A safety pilot, not an instructor. We said, sorry, you got to refly that five hours. And we did it here in a few days and worked day and night to get him in and get him done because his he didn't understand this, neither did his instructor. So we've had this happen probably three times. Again, the number three comes up. We've had this happen three times in the last 30 check rides over the last 30 months. So this is something that happens. So just something to be aware of. Make sure that you've got this covered in your logbook correctly because again, maybe some examiners will be okay with that, but our examiner is not. He is not okay with that. So a little tip for you in the commercial. We'll have a few others. We're going to go a little more into that on the commercial and instrument training. So we'll try to do something in the next video. So what we're doing 30 days of videos on topics we've seen over the last 30 months with our 30 Final Approach courses. So if you're interested, we've got time on the schedule. Right now we're pretty open. We got R22 and R44 availability. We've done more FACS this year than we have the last two years. But all of a sudden we did four of them. Boom, boom, boom. Wrapped them up and then boom, we got open schedule. So if you need to get a checkride done, you got the requirements in and you're ready and you just can't make it happen because examiner's out on medical. Your instructor just left. Aircraft's down for an overhaul, aircraft's down for an inspection or, or whatever the case is, reach out to us at 574-767-1797 and we'll see you in the next video. Peace out.

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