GYRONIMO APP Tim Tucker's Performance Pad Pro asked us for a review!

Hey, we're excited. Geronimo reached out to us at HOGS and asked us if we'd do a review of the weight and balance app. I currently have up the Tim Tucker's Performance Pad Pro for the R44 Raven. And of course I responded I'd be happy to do one. And we have a good example here to use for the R44. For those of you that are experienced helicopter pilots, you already understand weight and balance, but I'm going to go back to kind of the beginning to somebody who's new to helicopters and weight and balance. For example, in the R44 example, we need to figure out what's going to go on with the center of gravity and the weight of the aircraft as we add passengers, as we add fuel, as we burn fuel, as passengers get in and out. So weight and balance is a critical part of flying a helicopter, whether you're a private pilot or work in the commercial environment, even either way, it's super important. So we're going to go over and I'll display the app up on the HOGS Wall of Fame here in a minute and we'll go through a scenario and show you how this thing works. But it's pretty phenomenal. What do I think of it? It's amazing coming from somebody who's old school and for years we had to do weight and balance by hand. My least favorite thing to do in helicopters, manual weight and balance. It's horrible. This makes weight and balance an absolute breeze. It's absolutely amazing. So I'm already a thumbs up with what little bit I've used it. And of course I'm using it more and more now because with checkrides, for years you had to do old school weight and balance. Now using like an iPad with something like Geronimo is acceptable most of the time at the private level. Our examiner is letting private pilots use the iPad for weight and balance, but he still wants to see a paper copy and know that they know how to do it. So let's get to it. We'll go to the HOGS Wall of Fame and I'll give you an idea how this works. We'll display it up on one of the screens and I'll record the screen here for you for this presentation so you can see exactly what I'm looking at. But I'll simply explain the first one I'll do would be just me by myself. So this is our helicopter. November 181. Mike Bravo. Put myself at 208. Put zero for all the passengers and all the baggage. On the lower left hand side you can see main tank and aux tank. We're showing 11 in the main and 3 in the aux. That's just where it was set when I pulled the app up. So if we look over to the right we can see that everything is with inside those yellow lines. So we are within longitudinal and lateral CG limits. We can click over to longitudinal and we can see weight, arm and moment and we can click over to lateral on the right as well. So let's go back to chart view. So I'm going down here to the left hand corner and I'm going to slide all the way down to empty fuel. There we go, zero fuel with me on board by myself, no baggage. I am within the limits. Let's do the opposite. Let's go to the full of fuel. So down here on the left hand side, I'm sliding that bar all the way across to full fuel and guess what? Still within the center of gravity limits. So very cool. That quick. I can jump in here, put my weight in and know that I am within limits. Extremely cool. So let's just pick some scenarios. Let's put a passenger up front with me on the left hand side. Slide passenger over to let's say 179. Still within center of gravity limits. And with that one person, let's slide down to zero fuel. Down over to the left with that little bar. Boom. Still within limits. No problem. Let's add another passenger in the back on the left still within limits at zero fuel. Let's slide the bar across and see what happens. Going across, going across, going across, going across. There. We're getting close however, still within limits. Let's throw another passenger in on the right hand side behind me. Slide. Start sliding passenger weight. Oh boom. Look. Max gross weight exceeded out of cg. So with those four people full of fuel, this light, this flight is out. And I want to comment as I kind of mess with the numbers here. On the way into the airport today I was thinking how over the years people say, oh well, you were flying a turbine aircraft, you got a bigger aircraft, more power, you can carry more weight, you don't have problems. And that's not true. The bigger the helicopter, the bigger engine and the more stuff you jam in it. So whether you're flying a small little helicopter or, or a great big helicopter, you're always going to be limited on weight for your, for your weight and balance and your performance calculations, you're always going to be limited in any helicopter. So you can see sliding that back more to the center on the fuel, about halfway on the main, halfway on the auxiliary, pushing it there on the limits, but within limits. Let's see if we can go out of the limits without exceeding the 2400. I'm gonna take that passenger in the back. No, that don't do it. Oh, there we go. No, that's max weight. Let's go down that passenger. Go heavier on the passenger in the back. Aha. There, it's showing me I slid too far. Look, 301 on the passenger. That's too heavy for the. For the aircraft seat. So we haven't exceeded total aircraft weight. But we're exceeding seat weight. We'll slide him back a little bit. Go a bigger passenger up front. There we go. Sliding the front passenger to a higher weight. Boom. We have exceeded the CG takeoff. So you're doing this the old fashioned way. The way I learned, you just spend half an hour figuring all these different scenarios or more especially in the beginning when you were new to weight and balance. So let's click over to performance and take a look at that performance planning. For checkride purposes, I'm going to always recommend you go back to the POH and do it that way for your practical test, because again, on a practical test, maybe the examiner's letting you use an iPad, but what if your iPad freezes up and you say, oh, well, I got a backup iPad. Well, what if the battery's dead on that one? Electronics are great, but it's very easy for these things to cause your problems during checkride. So when you're at the practical test, I recommend everybody has a paper backup of everything so you can continue on and not get the checkride canceled because your electronics aren't working. All right, so we're going to take a look at this first. Notice about mid screen, left hand side, there's carb heat. Carb heat on, carb heat off. And with the current conditions, again, this is just what was on the iPad. I didn't move any of this before clicking record today. So this is showing outside air temperature 17 degrees Celsius, 63 Fahrenheit. Showing your local altimeter setting showing current takeoff weight and elevation 836. Over on the right hand side showing out of ground effect hover ceiling 3600 pressure altitude in ground effect hover ceiling 7200 pressure altitude and showing the max gross weights in the middle, showing the elevation middle. Lower hand side is showing density, altitude, pressure altitude, and the elevation. So you can see At a real quick glance, let's just kind of move some of the numbers around. You can adjust for your outside air temperature, adjust for your local altimeter setting, adjust for your elevation. That one I'm going To type in 1200 enter so you can very quickly see your max takeoff power limits, your maximum continuous power limits, and your vne. This thing is flipping amazing again. For us old school people that started out doing weight and balance by hand and all the performance by hand, this thing is pretty darn slick. And that's just kind of a little intro showing you what can be done with this, but I think pretty darn amazing. So we are helicopter online ground school going on 12 years online. Gave you a quick intro with the Hogs Wall of Fame this morning. We're just so proud of that. This wall we had full of pictures all the way across. We're down to five panels now. We had seven panels wide and it was full of pictures. And we had a final approach car, final approach customer come this summer. And he knew we were running out of space. He's like, why don't you make that thing digital? And it was hard to tear down all those pictures because we were so proud of it and it looked really, really cool and it was difficult. But now that we have the new wall built, the digital wall, you can see, not only can we use this for showing off all of our members, everybody gets to see themselves. Before, unless we took the camera right to every single picture, you'd never get a chance to see yourself. But now, because the wall of Fame is continually evolving, somebody passes a checkride, we add their picture to whichever section. And we just had a member here. I'm going to roll just a little video. We just had a member here. He was on the screen times four. So I'll insert that now so you can see it. And he actually has used done five checkrides using hogs. But we've only got four screens to pull up. So we put up four of pictures that he has sent in over the last seven years. He's a Hogs member of seven years and it was fun. He came up to fly the R44. I'm gonna flip the camera around. He came up to fly the R44 with us for a couple hours. He saw our hover auto rotation video and liked what he saw. He's like, man, I want to come up and just fly with you a little bit. Double eye and just want to come up and experience, have the HOGS experience and fly with us in the R44 here. Subscribe to the channel because we got a lot of new stuff coming out and if you've been with us for a while, you know that we've kind of upped the game. If you're new to us, there's lots of more coming out, Lots of more, lots more coming out. I'm going to put some freebies down below like our maneuver guide and a couple of my number one best selling books. I'll put down below so you can get free PDFs of those. And then we have a private pilot study guide. This thing keeps growing in popularity as time goes by. 400 questions in this dude. And we made it in a spiral bound so that when you sit down to work through it, you can lay it out flat. And we know a lot of people or a lot of books I've used in the past. It's you know, the normal bound book and you're trying to prep for testing and you're trying to hold the book down and have another book open when you're going to look for figures for written test practice. This is nice for that, right? Because you can lay it out. And Each chapter has one of 400 questions in the first half of the chapter and then the questions repeated with the correct answer. So you can sit down, go through each section, practice answering the question, how you would ask, how you would answer an examiner and then go to the second half of the chapter to see how you did. And we have certificates and documents, airworthiness requirements, weather information, cross country airspace performance limitation operation systems, aeromedical factors, general aerodynamics. I'm gonna put a link down below. You can sample that, a free PDF and or get the physical copy. So I'll put a link down below for that as well. So give us a thumbs up, give us a comment below, subscribe and we'll see you next video. Peace out. When you feel the pressure to fly, but know the right decision is to stay on the ground, hit the hogs, no go and live to fly another day. Helicopterground.com Yep, because that's why people get killed from making bad decisions and taking off and flying into bad weather when they shouldn't. Helicopter online ground school member as you see on the wall behind us here, these are all of our members that have passed checkrides. So they use our training to get through, let's say private pilot. Once they pass their checkride, they send us in a picture as you can see with their checkride helicopter. Usually either they're with their instructor or maybe they're with the examiner. But when they send us a picture by the aircraft and we like them right after the checkride because that's when they're excited, right? They just got that certificate in their hand and a lot of these people have that in the pictures. You'll see when they send us a picture to tell us they passed. And they usually just write a sentence or two. We don't ask for a, you know, 10 paragraph story, we just say, hey, how did hogs help you? And they'll usually say something like hey, couldn't have done it without hogs. You know, I could have never studied this big pile of overwhelming information on my own. Once they send that in there, then you Heather ships them the no go button. So how many no gos are you shipping today?

Today I am shipping 6 no go's. Where did the idea of the Hawk's no go button even come from?

I like telling the story about the no go button. When I was flying ems, I was working with this, this guy's name was Mike Matera, Vietnam era pilot. And I learned a lot of stuff from this Vietnam era pilot. It was cool working opposite him because I would learn lots of little things that shift change. And as an EMS pilot a lot of time the pressure is to make the call. You get the phone call, you know there's a patient somewhere that needs transported from point A to point B. And there's the pressures either by your of your own pressure to go because you haven't flown in a while, or maybe you're flung a little pressure from the hospital or the crew which shouldn't take place, but in the real world it does. Wherever that external pressure is, it's hard to make that decision sometimes. And especially, you know, the company I worked for five years, you could sleep at night, you could be in the middle of sleeping. 2:00am the phone rings, you have to take the call, check the weather, check the location, figure weights, how far do I gotta go? Pull the helicopter out and be in the air in 10 minutes. So you have to make a decision really, really quickly most of the time. And there's pressure behind making that decision. So Mike had an easy button, a Staples EZ button up on the shelf. And I can't remember if I witnessed him do it or he just told me however it came about, he was using the staples easy button to break the. I don't know the word I'm looking for. There's a lot of pressure to make that decision. So it was a way to relieve the stress. After example you tell dispatch, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to decline this flight due to weather. He'd hang up the phone and he'd reach up, bam, he would hit the easy button. And of course it says, that was easy. So to me, I thought it was great. It was cool, because it was a way to help you relieve the pressure of saying no. Whether you want to go or somebody else wants you to go, or you're feeling the pressure of whatever the flight is. And ems, they try to pretend or try to not have those pressures, but pressures come regardless. Real world pressures are just something that happens. So it's the pressure of going, man, you know, you hate telling people no, regardless. And you can take this in your own as a private pilot making the decision. You flew somewhere for lunch with your buddy and then you're getting ready to go back home and your son's playing ball that night. Then there's a storm. You want to get home because you want to go to your son's ball game. You don't want to disappoint your boy because you can't make it home. So you start going, well, maybe, can I fly around this storm? Can I wait it out? What can I do? And so you have these pressures sometimes you might create on your own reason because you want to get home for a family event. It's the pressure to fly. And this is a way that an individual can use it and your own decision making. And that's why it says no go. Because when you make that decision, I'm not going, you hit the button. Live to fly another day. Helicopterground.com Nice.

So, in essence, it's a visual cue, a visual reminder.

Perfect.

Can I have one for my flight school?

Can I have one for my flight school? Hmm, that's actually a good question. What we've done in the past is we've only sent them to members for passing the check ride, with the exception of maybe twice when we were alive, we gave one away. However, since that's a question I wasn't prepared for, I would love to see some of these at a flight school, but I'd like some kind of guarantee that that's where it's going. So that is a great question that I need to ponder. I think maybe we should think about that.

Who could they get ahold of if they.

Heatherelicopterground.com yeah, I think that's a grand idea. Preferably would be. We know we have flight schools and customers that send us members because they'll say, hey, where did you hear about us? And they might say Lone Star helicopters or straight up aviation in Florida. We know and we hear when our members are referred by their flight school. We know that because they'll usually tell us because when you sign up for hogs, it's a requirement. Where did you hear about us? So many times they'll put in there my flight school or straight up or Lone Star, whoever. If you want to qualify your flight school to get a hogs no go button, I say you contact heatherecopterground.com because I would love to see these. Well, that brings up that question. Brings up a good point. We recently had a member who not only sent in a picture, we had a member I think passed an additional checkride and he already had a no go button. And he said, I have the first no go button. I got at our flight school and we have a blast with it sitting around, live to fly another day, hitting the button. So that kind of inspired us. It's like, you know what, if they're having fun at a flight school sitting around, clicking the button, that's pretty huge because of the idea behind the no go button. So if people are hitting the button and they're talking about it, that's a good thing. Perfect.

Can I get one now before passing my checkride?

Well, good question. We discussed this morning a limited time offer of selling them and we threw out a number like $49.95. And we did say us only. I kind of said, let's think about it. And then we kind of thought, well, why not? Because in all transparency, we buy these 50 at a time. We buy a whole shipment of them. And with buying them, getting them shipped here, and then shipping them to a member, we spend about half of a monthly membership. So recently our examiner who we just did the rotor tips with down at Hale Expo, he said, man, if I was you, I'd start selling those because that way you could help offset the ones you're giving away for free. So I think if you're watching this video and you want one for a limited time only, we will ship you one within the US for $49.95. So I think I should build a link and put below this video where you can purchase your own HOGS no go button while the offer last. Supplies are going to last because we're giving them away. And now that we've started it, we can't stop. But I think the special offer to buy one should be limited time only and we'll decide later.

Can I Send you a video of me utilizing the hogs no go button.

Absolutely. We only have a few videos. We have a few, but we would like more. For example, one of our members sent in a picture or a video. He had his computer open looking at a storm and they had the no go button sitting there. And he sent the video and said, well, looking at the weather today, this was pretty easy. Live to fly another day. Helicopterground.com and he hit the button. We'd love to have videos of these because we have some pictures and we'd love more pictures of members that have a no go button. We'd love that because we should probably start a no go button wall for everybody that sends in a picture for their no go. I think we should.

An idea.

Did I answer your question? Yes.

Thank you very much.

Is that it?

Well, who can they send the video? If they utilize the honknow go button, who do they send that video to?

Preferably heatherelicopterground.com Great. But me too. Kennylicoground.com But Heather. Yeah. Or Kenny. Yep. Because that's why people get killed for making bad decisions and taking off and flying into bad weather when they shouldn't. And you can even go beyond weather. In the beginning, we called it the weather no go button. And then we kind of thought, you know, we should just call it the hogs no go button. Because it doesn't necessarily be weather. It could be you went on that flight with your buddy, you get ready to go back home and you have some kind of a maintenance issue that pops up and maybe you're scratching your head going, well, maybe we could make it. Or you start playing that game of, you know, in your gut, you should probably just stay, stay put and get a mechanic to come out and you try to finagle. Well, it's. I could market, you know, inoperative and I could do this or do that. A lot of times it's gonna be better just to take the safe route, stay on the ground and hit the no go. Or just say, it's so funny.

The reason I didn't ask you about where it came about is I. In my head, I was sure you.

Would get there on my own. Yep. Okay, let's look at our clips. Who cares?