Kenny Keller recommends commercial helicopter pilots get an optometrist eye exam before their FAA medical exam. He struggled with the medical eye test and now gets a pre-exam from a pilot-optometrist who provides written documentation. After age 50, the FAA requires an additional eye test.
Hello, I'm Kenny Keller, the creator of Helicopter Online Ground School and author of the Amazon bestseller Helicopter Checkride. And I want to give you a tip today about getting your medical certificate and renewing your medical certificate and your eyes, whether you wear glasses or not. I just completed an eye exam before going to get my medical and I'm going to tell you why that is a huge tip. But first I want to mention 11-8-626 Papa is here. The helicopter we're going to be using for filming for commercial checkride preparation. We also have a new area upstairs in our office. It's right up here where I have an area set up to do the interview with two cameras. And we have some cool new scent absorbing material and a new mic for Gary to try to make a really nice presentation of these ground recording. And I also want to just thank our members, current members, Test Flight and Test Drive customers, friends, followers on Facebook and YouTube and all the other social media. We've had an awesome 4 years so far with online Ground school. We now have the brand new Online Ground School released. Members are loving it, new people are loving it coming in. We're always expanding and adding to it and coming up with new presentation. Operations manager Brian Rutledge keeps bringing us new stuff. It's just totally incredible with what we've done and the future looks bright with all the new stuff that we have coming out. Everything we do is going to get better, faster, more of everything. It's just been an absolute blast. So sincere thank you to all of our members. So now to the medical tip. I want to give you a little insight on trouble I've had over the years with my medical. Never been any real physical problems other than the accident I was in where I had a back injury, which is another day, another story. The thing I've always struggled with is the eye test. And I'm interested to find out how many of you have had this problem. If you think about it, you're not at an eye doctor, you're at a medical examiner. And usually the people giving you the test are not optometrists, they're usually nurses. So every year I really struggled. One year when I was even working out of state, I was full time flying for somebody else. I go down to renew my medical towards the end of the month and the guy fails me on the eye test and I'm like kind of freaking out. So when he explains to me which test during the eye test I didn't fail, I said, well, you know, I really struggled with that. And I didn't really understand what she was actually asking me to do. So he gave me a retest and I passed the second time. But I can tell you, when you're out there in the world working for a living and all of a sudden you're worried about losing your medical, there's a lot of red tape if you have a problem with a medical certificate. So what I've been doing the last 10 years, every time I go to get my medical, I first schedule an eye appointment with an optometrist and I go get a fresh eye exam. And the cool part of the story is the eye doctor that I go to is an airplane pilot. He's been giving me a test yearly now for about 10 years. And even he says, do you know what it's like to be an eye doctor and struggle with the eye test when I go to get my medical? So this particular eye doctor has had the same trouble over the years, gets frustrated and gets anxious over the eye test during the medical exam. So now when I go to my medical, I go in with a fresh examination, proof of my eye test, how well I can see with and without glasses. And this year we had to make an extra test because I'm now 50 years old. So there was one requirement for the Class 2 medical that changed due to my age. So yeah, go ahead, tell me. I only 50, right? Tell me, go ahead. So the medical tip is go get an eye exam before going to the medical. So if you do have a problem, you can get it rectified. If you need new glasses or some other problem and you can go in with the confidence as I do. This eye doctor, being a pilot, he actually writes me a letter stating, you know, that I'm going in for my medical. He's tested me with and without glasses, what my results are and that I should be able to pass that test with my current vision and glasses, I can tell you it goes so much better when you can go in with a confidence that you're not going to struggle with the eye exam. Thanks for watching this video. Please go below Like Share Leave comments. You know, the.
