Got a little bite from Get-Home-Itis, make the No Go Decision and Forget it!

All right, first words. That was fun. Awesome. How long was it? Three hours. Sweet. It's good. It's a good flight. All right, Kenneth, helicopter on ground school. We're back. We got her inside just before the weather come in. And I just wanted to debrief this quick ferry flight we did. And I want to harp on the get home. I just kind of thing. And I want to harp on it because, you know, we all. We're always harping on going inadvertent IMC and people losing their lives and accidents happening from people taking off in bad weather. Right. It happens a lot, frequently. And I did a video the night before we left, and I did a video yesterday about how we, you know, went through the maintenance yesterday morning, talked to the mechanic, did some test flying, and I truly, when I was going through all that, I just didn't worry about the weather, right. Because I knew it would be pushing myself to worry about getting everything ready to go and trying to get home all in the same day. I mean, I wanted to. Right. Who doesn't want to get home? But I just kind of kept it out of my mind. And when we were flying the pattern, I knew it wasn't the best out, but I mean, it was kind of iffy. Was okay for doing the pattern, but, you know, doing the pattern and traveling 200 nautical miles back home, it's two different things. And so we got all the maintenance done, like I said in the video yesterday. And the aircraft was running great, running smooth. And the new updates, the rotor system made a smooth helicopter even smoother. So it's running and flying probably better than it has the 17 years that I've been associated with this aircraft and flying it. But we get everything ready to go and the usual excitement of thinking about hopping in the helicopter and flying back home, number one, I'm excited to get it back, get it into the studio and start doing some more videos with the helicopter updating some of the stuff on our site. And so you kind of get caught up for just a moment, right? And I'm like, okay, well, I know the weather is kind of iffy. Instead of looking straight and start picking the route apart with the weather, I thought, I'm going to call flight service first, just in case there's some TFR or something. And normally I look at the weather first, but I'm just going to call flight service right off the bat. And, you know, all the times I've called flight service, they've never. Usually they're really pretty friendly. And this guy was Kind of, he was a little persnickety and I was kind of surprised, but. And I mentioned the video yesterday, you know, he said, VFR not recommended right off the bat, right? I'm like, okay. And then when he explained the reports of icing along the route and the IFR conditions along the route, that's when I said, yep, you know what, there's no use even me really digging in any farther. I said, thanks, that's all I need to know. And I hang up. And so I go and tell the Jim that was traveling with me, who was there to kind of wait and see if I was going to get home or not, and also travel kind of along the route in the Jeep in case I needed help along the way, had to stop for some reason. And that little bit of get home, I just kind of bit me, right? Just. And I don't know why, as much as I preach it, it happened to me, right, Because I kind of wanted to go. And so I picked the iPad up and just started looking at the route and, and I could see where their IFR was really just a little bit south of my route, right? And so just for a split second, you know, I did kind of start second guessing myself and I just went, stop it. You know, from my EMS days, I remember this Vietnam air pilot that taught me about once you make that decision that you're not going be done with it because I, like probably many of you have sat around after making a no go decision, then you sit around and you get back on the computer and you play around, you look at it and you sit there and kind of go, hmm, you know, I could have, you know, well, if I just stay north and if I go now and you play that game with yourself sometimes, right? And luckily it only happened to me for a few minutes, very short time, really, I'm just like, just stop it. You know, put the thing down. And when I was talking to the mechanic and there was quite a few guys hanging around, right? And we're all discussing the weather stuff and, and I just said, what do I got to get home for? You know, my daughter during the week's with her mom, so there wasn't going to be anybody at my house when I got home if I would have tried it last night. There was no reason whatsoever really that I had to go other than just anxious to do a cross country flight. That's kind of fun. And you know, I was excited to fly the instrument again. And with all the new upgrades and being so smooth, I was excited to fly. And I wanted to get it back to the hangar and see how I was going to, you know, size up with the new studio and start kind of moving things around and playing with lighting and everything. So I was excited to get home, but then I just, you know, said, just forget it. You know, it's done. So we hung around a little bit, talked to the mechanic, because I've known this mechanic almost 20 years, don't get to see him very often. So we had fun telling war stories and talking about helicopters and all kinds of stuff. And then I, you know, hotwired hotel, hotel rooms for me and Jim to just hang out in town. Last night, I gave him the option. I said, if you want to head home, I'll just uber it back and forth tomorrow. And he's like, nah, you know what? By the time I get home, it'll be late. I'll just stay in town with you and make sure you get going in the morning. Which was cool because we left at the same time today. Right? And in the event, some maintenance problem popped up or weather, which didn't, and weather ended up being great. But so back to the story. So it was cool. We went and had supper. Dr. Nick come out and met us. We had a good time, went and got some good sleep in the hotel. We knew that mechanic had a seal coming in on something. One more thing he wanted to do that could have been done later, but he thought, hey, if you guys are delayed now, I might try to sneak this in in the morning. I got it ordered, and it'll be here in the morning. So we knew we had time in the morning to get up, eat breakfast, and the weather was 10 times better today, or 20 or 30 times better today. It was a real piece of cake. Got up, had a coffee, had some breakfast, went back to the room, pull up the iPad and look at the route. And it's like, you know, 10 miles in 2500, 10 miles in 6000. All along the route, it looked really, really good. And I knew that later in the day, they were planning for snow, a storm coming in, which is actually here now, But I got home in plenty of time. So by looking at it and checking the weather, I knew as long as if I could get on the road or get flying home by noon, I had plenty of time to make it, as long as I didn't have any trouble along the way to get back to the hangar and not be pushing it. And it ended up working perfectly because we got there about 10. The seals had arrived early they already had the panels off so they could put this seal in if they wanted to change. And very quickly they had the thing back together and had me ready to go by like 11 o'. Clock. So I had about a five hour window for about a two to two and a half hour flight, not including a fuel stop. So I'm like, okay, this feels pretty good. Leaving at 11, knowing I really want to be back home in Indiana before 4 o'. Clock. I ended up making it by 2 and I even had a tailwind today. So. And having that tailwind seems like, you know, probably a lot of, you know, if you go on a trip a lot of time, it's like, why is it the winds always off your nose? Why is it, you know, even though it's most generally out of the west, for some reason, it's always off your nose, right? And this trip that I make back and forth that I have for years to Ohio, seems like every single time the wind changes on me, it's always off my nose. So by waiting the night, the weather looked great. This morning, it was an easy weather decision. Had a tailwind coming home, the flight was awesome, the scenery was great and the aircraft flew good. And I had a blast flying home. And just thinking through it like how yesterday just kind of in the moment, right? You just, you want to get home. So this is something that we do talk about frequently, and we should talk about frequently because it's not like you just make a decision one time or learn and train one time. We have to keep telling ourselves these things over and over and over. And as much as I preach, you know, I thought about it yesterday, I'm like, here I'm the guy preaching all this stuff all the time. Why would I even think about taking off if it's even kind of remotely iffy? But sometimes you do that because you go, well, but I'm in a helicopter, right? But that's where you start getting into trouble, right? It's easy to second guess yourself. I want to touch back on that Vietnam Air pilot again. It was when I was flying EMS that this one individual I learned a lot from, and he was the first one that one day we were talking about some particular flight and I had turned it down. And then I was sitting around after checking it and looking at it, and I was like, ah, you know, maybe I could have done that flight. And he said, stop that shit. He just said, when you make this decision, these decisions, and he goes, kenny, make it and be done. Do not go back to the computer. Do not sit around, talk about it. Just make the no go decision and forget it. Just be done. And it's simple advice, but it's also simple to not heed that advice. So I understand why pilots take off sometimes when the weather isn't the best, right? Whether it's get home, itis, whether it's something you got to do with your family or an important appointment. And those are the internal pressures that we put on us. There can be pressures from outside sources, a company you're working for, a customer, aircraft you're trying to move, or whatever the case is. There's so many things that can come into play on these go no go decisions. And I just wanted to be transparent and do a video and say, you know, just for a slight bit, I'm guilty of going, you know, I wanted to go home when I go, ah, could I have made it? No, just, you know, it's ugly, you know, it's iffy, say no. And then the next day, boom. The next morning, good night of sleep, the weather looks great, go see the mechanic, shake hands, see you later, hop in the helicopter and have a freaking wonderful flight home. So when you get in yourself in those positions, just think, I'll go tomorrow. Or if you got to get home for something, you leave the aircraft sitting, you get a rental car, you know, and we thought about that yesterday after I said no, it wasn't looking real good for the next few days, but today was better than the ones that are going to be following, right. And so yesterday I said, you know what, we'll stay tonight and if it don't look good tomorrow, I'll just jump in the jeep with you, Jim, and we'll just go home and I'll come back next week. Yeah, it's four and a half hours one way, but who cares really? I mean, is it worth your life? Is it worth your career? You know, is it worth it? It's not so human nature, we're all human and we do it to ourselves. So my point is it's a continual decision making basis and telling yourself to do the right thing, you know, in your, you know, in your heart what's right, you know, but your heart might be the other reason why you, why you want to go for whatever, you know, whatever personal reason why you really want to get somewhere and try to make it. So glad we made it back. Excited to have the instrument back. Looks good in the hangar. We're going to start doing some freshening up some videos in the site. A lot of members liked it before when we were doing some videos with the helicopter. And it will be nice. I just said it in the last couple days in the videos. It's just nice to be presenting and talking about something and go, oh, you know, talking about rotor blades, boom, there's the helicopter. We can walk over and talk about a rotor blade or a tail rotor or a horizontal stabilizer, landing gear, cyclics and collectives, all the different pieces and parts. It's just nice to have the helicopter in the studio right where we never used to, you know, we always had to drag our gear downstairs and then maybe there's somebody downstairs working on an aircraft because we were in a community hangar. So a community hangar that wasn't heated. I mean, they would let us turn the heat on, but you really had to plan out making a video. You had to go, okay, well let's shoot a video tomorrow. Well, hey, let's go. Turn the heat up, start warming the hangar up. And then somebody else wants to take an aircraft in and out and the door goes up or down or a maintenance guy's there banging around in an aircraft. It was just difficult a lot of times to shoot video with an aircraft when we wanted to. And to now have the aircraft as part of our studio in our own heated hangar where it's nice and quiet with no distractions. Want to make a video with the aircraft? Boom. Right there. It is. So excited. Alright, subscribe the channel. Click that little bell so you can be notified of our daily video. Keep making good decisions on these weather goes and no go's. Do what's right. When it looks ugly, call it off, move on with your day. All right, just comment down below and we'll see you in the next video.