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Foreigny Sharkey and we are inside the Sweet Helicopter hangar located in Goshen, Indiana. In just a few minutes we will push the aircraft outside and get started on our journey to successfully passing your next practical test. Sweet Helicopters is owned and operated by Chuck Surak, who also happens to be a commercial helicopter pilot himself. Sweet Helicopters corporate headquarters and maintenance facility are located in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Today we are going to produce a video called Rotor Tips. In this video you will view 10 tips on helping students pass their rotorcraft practical test. Last year Kenny Keller, creator of Helicopter Online Ground school did a 10 part series on the top 10 pet peeves as a DPE. Now we've taken that series and redefined it into the latest rotor tips. We hope that you find them helpful. If nothing else, I hope you enjoyed the ride in our Agusta 109s. Kenny has cameras positioned in different places throughout the aircraft to give you some great angles. Now I do have to mention this disclaimer. Today's rotor tips are not mandated by the FAA and they are only to serve as an educational guideline as you prepare to take your practical rotorcraft test.

Welcome aboard Aragusta 109s. It is one of three twin engine helicopters here in our Swede helicopter VIP fleet. Joining me up front on this flight is no stranger to twin engine helicopters, Kenny Keller. Kenny will be flying along with us and here eventually he is going to take the controls and I am going to list our newest top 10 rotor tips for passing your next practical test. Our first rotor tip. It doesn't require any studying at all and it should be a given, but unfortunately for many people it is not. So let's bring it to the forefront and that is first impressions. It seems like there are acronyms for everything in aviation, right? Let's pick one for first impressions because it includes three separate subjects that I want to talk about. Let's use oat. Now for many of you pilots, oat, it stands for outside air temperature. But for the purpose of this conversation, let's make oat. OAT stand for this. O is organized a appearance nt timeliness. Check out this video on how not to participate in OAT.

River.

I want.

Sorry.

We're down to the checklist now where I need to identify you so I need a photo ID your FAA medical and your current pilot's license. If you could get those to me, I will run out. Make a copy.

All right, let me look for all that stuff.

Okay.

Again, I apologize for being late. I was. There's my license. I was out with friends last night and I forgot to set my alarm and it was a late night and.

Where.

Oh, what's wrong?

I thought my medical was in here. Hang on, let me see if I can find my medical.

Okay, so so far I have your driver's license for Indiana, so I.

Let me.

I still need an FAA medical. Oh, there's my pilot's license. Okay.

All right.

Man, I don't know what I do with my medical. Maybe I should have stayed home last night. I got all this stuff ready. I don't. Hang on, hang on. Is there a way to get it if I don't have it?

No, I have to have your medical.

Are you sure you packed it?

Yeah, I think.

I don't know why it's.

You look a little unorganized.

Well, yeah, like I said, it was spirit of moment going on last night.

Oh, there it is.

Let's make sure it's valid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go.

Yeah. I'm sorry. I apologize.

Okay, I will go make copies and I will be right back.

Okay. Oh, man.

This is not going well so far. Hope it gets better. What else could go wrong?

Organized in the video, Esau, our applicant is clearly not organized. His papers are scattered throughout the video. He has difficulty locating the documents needed to identify himself and that includes the FAA medical and the pilot's license. A. His appearance now wearing a T shirt, shorts and flip flops is probably just slightly too relaxed. But I'm also not advocating that you need to show up in a three piece suit or a dress. So how about somewhere in the middle? I think they call it business casual might be appropriate. You know, maybe khakis and a polo shirt would be ideal. So appearance, that's important. And lastly, on oat, it's timeliness. Timeliness. It falls under first impressions. My recommendation is to maybe 30 to 60 minutes before the scheduled appointment with the examiner. That way you can take your time and you can relax. You'll get there plenty early and you can get things set up. Maybe look around the building that you're meeting and if you this is your first time there, you'll want to find out where the coffee pot is and maybe where the restrooms are at and that will just help you be relaxed as well. So again, we're talking about oat organized appearance and timeliness. And if you follow those three suggestions, I can almost assure you it will help reduce the stress. More on stress coming up, our next rotor tip is know the PTS book inside and out. There are no secrets with this one. The FAA publishes exactly what the applicant should be studying for and what to expect on the checkride. One of my personal pet peeves is when a flight instructor calls me, maybe the. Before the checkride and will say something like this. Hey, my student wants to know what areas of operation that he or she should be studying for for tomorrow's checkride.

Yeah, I'm just sitting here. I'm all anxious about the checkride tomorrow. Hey, I was thinking, what am I supposed to study exactly?

I don't.

I don't. There's so much stuff that we covered. I just didn't know what to look at. Pts? What are you, Post Traumatic something or other? Oh, the practical test standards. Yeah, I think I got that book. It's a small little book that you. That's the test.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, I'll. I think I got it. I'll open it up and see. Does it talk about, like, it covers, like, systems for aircraft and weather and. All right, what should I wear? I mean, should I. Because I just want to be comfortable. I'm gonna be all nervous anyway. I heard that examiner is a real stickler. Yeah, he only passes, like, one out of 100 or something. All right, so cover the practical test standards and just review, like, systems of the aircraft and weight and balance and all that.

Right? All right.

All right.

Practical test standards. I got it.

Got it.

That's the exam.

All right.

Got it.

All right.

I appreciate it. Thanks.

My response is the same every time. It's very simple. Whatever is in the PTS works well for everyone. Additionally, whatever questions that the applicant has missed on the knowledge test will be incorporated into the oral questioning. Now, say, for example, that the applicant maybe missed three questions regarding airspace. There really is a high probability that during the oral questioning portion of the test that we are going to talk about airspace. So what do they need to study for? You don't need to call me and ask. Just make sure that they are aware of the practical test guide. It's all fair game. Whatever in there is fair game. Now, again, we can't ask everything that's in that book because it would take a couple of days to go through it. But there are no surprises whatever in the PTS will likely or areas of it will show up. The practical test. Our next rotor tip is talking about The IACRA login and password, or at least the struggles with the IQRA login and password. I have spent literally countless hours with applicants not knowing how to login to this government website. And it really shouldn't be that difficult. However, you will be shocked how painful that this step can be for the applicant. And what I have found for those that struggle with that login procedure is that the stress level goes up. And anytime the stress level goes up is when we start to lose some of the focus. So this note to the instructors make sure that they know how to login to iacra. And the purpose of that is that the applicant needs to sign electronically the 8710 form. It's just part of the pre test protocols that the applicant has to do on this government website. And sadly, after three attempts, the website will lock the applicant out. And I've had this happen a few times. I'm sure other DPEs will attest to this, too. And it can delay the test an hour, maybe a couple hours.

All right, Mr. Houser, we are all the way down now to where you need to log into this, the 8710, and sign it for me. So looks like you don't have an iPad or anything, so I'll just let you use my laptop. So I am logged out and I will now just turn this around and I'll let you log in and then you can sign it electronically.

Okay.

Most guys have their password written down someplace.

Oh, I always remember my password.

You got it. Because a lot of people struggle here.

Yeah. So.

Yeah. I'm glad you came prepared and have it ready to go.

All right, go ahead.

No problem.

Yep, go ahead.

Oh, that. That didn't work.

Okay, keep in mind you're only allowed three chances and it will lock you out.

Okay.

Let me try again then. Hang on.

Okay.

All right.

I'm pretty sure this is it.

Okay. Good deal.

Here we go. Here we go.

Here we go.

Excellent.

Okay.

What?

No.

Are you locked out?

It's telling me that I've got to.

Do a password recovery and call, I think. I apologize. I guess I probably should have wrote that down or had it somewhere.

All right.

Hi. I need help.

So, again, this is just a. It's just a recommendation to make sure that as an instructor, you have prepped your student well enough. And this one's pretty easy. Just write it down someplace. Write down the login and the password, and this will go just so much easier for him. Our next rotor tip is talking about nerves. Everybody's nervous when they come to checkrides. And as examiners, we understand that undoubtedly the biggest obstacle is to overcome those nerves on checkride day. Here are just a couple of ideas that have really been successful for me. Arrive early and get everything organized on the table in front of you. If this is an unfamiliar place, take time to walk around and know your surroundings and then go back to the meeting room, sit down and relax. This is not the time for last minute studying. This is the time that you need to do whatever helps you relax. Now, some people have earbuds with soft music playing before the examiner arrives. Okay, so the examiner is there now. Maybe do some small talk with him before the test begins. You can talk about your families, you can talk about aviation. Everybody likes to talk about aviation, right? So maybe do that. This is also big that I have found that works is don't tell the world of the day of your checkride. In fact, maybe keep it a secret. That way if things don't work out exactly like you had hoped it would, you don't have to go back and tell anybody about it.

I saw the instrum sitting out there and man, what a great looking helicopter. So yeah, let's just figure out what you know in reference to the aircraft itself. You brought the 280Fx. Can you tell me what the maximum gross weight of the aircraft is?

That includes like fuel, right? And luggage and all that together?

Normally, yes.

I want to say it's like, man, I want to say it's like 27, 000 pounds. No, not 27, 000. Like 2700. Maybe somewhere in there, give or take the density, altitude, maybe somewhere in there.

Let's.

What, what do you think?

I mean, what would you suggest?

What do I think?

Yeah, well, I'll tell you what I think. But I guess right now.

I'll tell you what, Mr. Sharky, I'm just, I'm just so nervous.

You look, you look nervous.

So what's.

I told my friends and my family, I told everybody about this checkride today. And so I just really have to do well and pass. I told my girlfriend after I pass, we'll fly down and we'll go get dinner somewhere. So I'm just really. I feel like I just got all this pressure and I just. Maybe I'm just not.

Part of passing a checkride is being able to control your own nerves. And you got off to a rough start just because you were about 20 minutes late.

So keep it a secret. Also, part of the briefing is to let the applicant know that perfection is not the standard. It's what we will tell the applicant. And what does that mean? It means that you aren't expected to know every answer that is asked of you. I had an applicant, I think it was this past month that said to me, oh, man, I can't. I'm drawing a total blank. Can I call a friend? Well, I can't exactly let you call a friend. But what I can do is have you take time and look at your notes or go to your book and look it up. And that's okay. You know, we expect that there are times that it's perfectly fine to go to your notes or go to the book. What I would encourage you to do is, is don't try to bluff the examiner because he's going to figure that out pretty quick. So be honest, just let him know that you forgot that one. You've talked about it, but you just can't think of it. And I'm pretty confident, as long as you're not doing it every couple of minutes, that he'll let you do that. I have found that those applicants that have gotten off to a good, solid start are those applicants that have showed up on time, that are organized and competent in their knowledge of their aircraft. Those ones that have prepped hard the day before the checkride. That has always worked out well by following those rules, I believe also will help calm those nerves. Our next rotor tip is. Where are all of your endorsements? This one is the responsibility of your flight instructor. It's his or her responsibility to make sure you have all the proper endorsements that have been signed with the corresponding FAR. A good source is the Advisory Circular 6165. It's dated to August of 2018. Or just simply search FAA piloted endorsements. It's also not a bad idea to tab out the requirements in Part 61. This will help the examiner verify that you meet the requirements of 61, 109. And our next rotor tip is talking about a lack of knowledge on the maintenance records. I believe that more time needs to be spent from flight instructors on this topic because logbooks are so valuable that we are finding more flight schools and owners of helicopters are reluctant, may be hesitant to let those maintenance log books leave the building or come out of the safe. But as a result, I've also seen that applicants are really weak in that area.

Okay, so would the sheet, would it say like annual on the sticker?

Have you, have you seen these before?

Sir, I gotta be honest with you, I've never Seen this book before.

You've never seen a maintenance logbook before?

No.

You know, every time I'd show up for training the instructor, we would do a little bit of ground, then we would go fly for an hour and a half. And I would ask every once in a while and he would just say, oh, we'll do it next time. And of course I'm at flying at a flight school and they keep them locked up in their maintenance bay or whatever and, and it just seems like every time I'd say something it was always, oh, how about we do it next time? Or, you know, and then. Okay, so I gotta, I gotta be honest with you. This is first time I've seen this boat.

Okay. All right, so let's take a break. I will get a hold of your instructor and we will see where to go from here.

Okay, thank.

So what I would like to see are instructors to go get the maintenance log books, get them out of the safe again, take good care of them and sit down with your students and go through it and make sure they know the difference between what an annual is and what a 100 hour inspection might be. Point out the pedal static inspections. I have found that some flight schools will send along a status sheet. It's typically just a one page document and on that sheet it will show me when the annual was done, that 100 hour was done, maybe the component times. It summarizes everything. But again, it is not a substitute for the maintenance law books themselves. So my recommendation on this one to you instructors are to spend more time with your students in the maintenance lookbooks. Our next rotor tip is to know your aircraft. Some of the best applicants that I've seen over the years are those that are really, really familiar with the rotorcraft flight manual, the RFM or the PoH, whatever you want to call it. Those applicants that show up in their own own aircraft, well, they probably have a slight advantage over someone who is renting from the local flight school. This happens to be one of my least favorite statements from the applicant. And that is, well, this is probably the last time I'll be flying this make and model because I'm buying my own helicopter when I get home. So what they really are trying to imply is that they really don't need to be that familiar with a helicopter that they showed up for in the check ride. And I want to let the applicants know that this is really incorrect thinking. You should treat that this make and model honestly is the one that's going to get you safely home by yourself. If you happen to have flown to the checkride that day. I hear the excuse a lot when they say, well, you know, I'm just here long enough to get transition into the aircraft. I'm going to use this helicopter to take a check right in. I really want them to understand and to know the aircraft. I feel that the emergency procedures in the RFM are very important. I will ask applicants if this specific light illuminates, what does it mean and what is the pilot's corrective action? Because in the event of an actual emergency, you will not have time to refer to the RFM for guidance.

All right, let's just talk about the emergency section of the. Of the 280Fx.

Okay.

What happens if this red light comes on when you're flying? It's going to be up here on the annunciator panel. So it's this specific red light. Tell me what the pilot's corrective action is when you see that light.

Oh, I'm gonna just start praying. I'm just probably not. I'm probably gonna tell my passengers that we're probably going down.

I mean, red means bad, so typically.

But this red light itself, what does that indicate?

What is that? Is that the low rotor rpm? Oh, that means that the rotor is spinning way too fast.

The.

Oh, low.

God, see, I can't even think straight. Low rotor, duh. Low rotor means that the. The rotor is not spinning fast enough.

Yeah, let's just stop here for a second and let's talk about how this is going.

You mind if I take a break?

Yeah.

Can I go to the bathroom?

Yeah, yeah.

Get going.

All right.

You know, we're only 500ft above the ground or 1,000ft above the ground. In the event of an engine failure, you won't have time to go grab the RFM and reference it. So there are certain portions of the emergency section that I feel that you do need to memorize and not only to pass the oral portion of the test, but even more importantly, it could save your life. So please know your aircraft. Our next rotor tip is, the winds are so much stronger than I'm used to. If I had a dime for every time that an applicant blamed the winds as a reason for their poor performance. I would encourage the applicants to fly with their instructors on the windy days and the gusty days. I know it's easy to cancel on those days, but if checkride day happens to be a little windier day, they really can't be using the winds as an excuse for their poor performance. And I've seen that from time to time. And as helicopter pilots, we can use the winds to our favor for some of the tasks that are going to be conducted that day. I'll talk to instructors right here. If. If you feel the winds are really gusty and, you know, maybe severe, too strong. Yeah, it's okay to cancel that. What I'm talking about is don't be afraid to fly in those days where the winds are gusting up over 20 knots, because there probably will be a day that your student is going to have to fly in conditions like that. So it's important to fly in all types of weather conditions. The winds are much stronger than I'm used to. Keep that in mind, instructors, and let's try to fly with the students even on some of the windier days. Our next rotor tip is, can I use my iPad in place of paper? And my answer is, you bet. However, don't let an electronic device become your worst enemy. An airplane DPE colleague told me that his applicant iPads froze during a simulated ILS approach, and the applicant did not have a backup. And when the examiner asked him to execute the missed approach procedure, well, guess what? The applicant also froze, and that checkride ended soon thereafter. I also had an applicant that was using his electronic device for a weight and balance calculation only discover that it was using the incorrect starting numbers for the empty weight and moment. Sadly, he was using the sample numbers that were printed in the RFM and not the actual weight and balance that was printed on the separate weight balance page. So, again, electronic devices are permissible for the practical test. I encourage them, in fact, because I do feel that they're more accurate when properly utilized. Just make sure that you have a backup plan and most certainly have a clear understanding of how to do a weight balance by longhand in the event that you're asked to do it. So can I bring the iPad? Absolutely. Cushion traffic. Helicopter five zero toe. We're on the right downwind for Runway nine. And we'll be number two for the airport. All right, you're below 100 knots. Here comes the gear.

Three green.

I see them. You see them?

Yep.

And we go to 102% on the RPM landing gears down 3 green. RPM switch 102. Radar is off. Never used it. Brakes are off. Those wheel steering off. You're good to land. You got the diamond out there? Yep, I got it. You're good. Checks. Everything's down. Looking good, Mr. Show off. All right, go up it all the way down. Beautiful. And our last rotor tip is talking about. You just passed the aural Congratulations. Now it is time to fly. Tell the examiner that you would like to take a small break before flying. Use this time to catch your breath, grab a snack and make sure to stay hydrated. Use your iPad to check the current metar Know the surface winds and go over in your mind how you're going to hover taxi for the takeoff. Know the notams for the airport and the airspace around you as you pre flight the aircraft. Make sure to take your time. Have that checklist in your hands at all times and reference it and do one final walk around before entering the aircraft to confirm that all of the doors are now closed and latched. Use the checklist for your engine start again. You'll want to listen to the AWOS or ASOS to verify the winds. Speak clearly on the UNICOM or the tower frequency and remember you can't do anything too slow. Did I mention I used the checklist before placing the checklist down prior to takeoff, do one last final print on check. I had an applicant try to take off with me with the boost pump off and the red light staring right at him. Yes, he had to come back later, but I felt bad for him because he was so nervous and he was carelessly rushing through the checklist that he had overlooked that he had left the pump in the offed position. So anyhow, that is the rotor tip that we want to talk about after you've got through your oral portion of the test. So let's recap the rotor tips. First impressions Remember the acronym oat. OAT Organized Appearance Timeliness. Know your maintenance records. Maybe grab a status sheet to take with you. Know your IACURA login and password. Write it down. Whatever it takes to have it with you thoroughly. Know the pts. Anything in there is fair game for the examiner. Know your aircraft. Memorize the emergency procedures when necessary. Know the limitations section like the back of your hand. Know the different sections in the POH or RFM and what each section represents. Fly on the windy days and don't be intimidated with stronger winds. Use the winds in your favor. Make sure that your iPad is charged and ready to go. Do you have the correct weight and balance in your iPad? What is your backup paper or another electronic device? Have something to fall back on. Have your instructor confirm and reconfirm the proper endorsements. Too many checkrides never get started due to incorrect endorsements. This does add to the stress level if the instructor has to get involved at the last minute to make those corrections. Calm the nerves. What is relaxing to you? Everyone has a different way of relaxing. Figure it out before checkride day. And for heaven's sakes, don't tell everybody the day of your checkride. Be organized, be early, be smart, be confident. Be a safe pilot. One word. Checklist, period. Use your checklist. And remember, you can't do anything too slow in the helicopter. I truly hope in some small way that this video has helped you. Here's to much success. And stay flyin'. Live to fly another day.

Helicopterground.com. Little feedback there.

Sorry.

Hey, we got a bunch of viewers in there. Awesome. We are going to give away the first book. Do you. Have you sent your message yet?

I have no questions yet. Just a lot of people saying Randy's great. They love the reenactment from Hauser and it's a Happy New Year's Eve.

Hauser was definitely fun when we made that series of videos. You know, that was actually the examiner's idea. He goes, we come up with the.

Idea of doing that.

He goes, well, let's get Hauser. And I'm like, yeah, that would, that'd be good. And we just told Hauser what we wanted to do. So all that, what he ad libbed.

He came up with. Everything he did was pretty much on his own.

He was absolutely hilarious. And that is who you fly with. If you come here and fly with us. How's your. Is my right hand man. So the first person that puts in a flight or helicopter flight or ground training question.

I just got one in from Dreadnova. She wants to know or they want to know, have you tried the Icarus device and is it useful?

Yeah, as a matter of fact we have one right here.

Right here.

It's a fun story. At Heli Expo last year, I was walking down the. Walking through the expo with my daughter and this kid runs out in the middle, right? Here's one, this young man, the guy that or the kid, I shouldn't call him a kid. The gentleman that invented this come running out and grab me. He goes, hey Kenny, I'd like to show you my device. And so I went over to the booth and he was at a helicopter booth and he started showing me his thing. I go, well, we don't have an instrument trainer. You know, we don't really do that much instrument training. And he, he kind of looked deflated when I said that. And I go, well, go ahead and. But go ahead and show me your product, right? And so he showed me how it worked and I was like, that's pretty cool. That's pretty interesting. I said, or he asked me, he told me he's gonna be coming to Indiana for something. He goes, if I come to Indiana, could I stop by? And I said, yeah, we have an R44. It's not necessarily an instrument trainer, but, you know, we could go try it out anyway. He followed through and he did, and he came here. We did a video on it. We've done a couple videos on the Icarus, actually. And I was totally impressed not only with this young man for his, you know, going forward attitude, to come over and grab me walking down the aisle and show me his product and then to show up here and do a video. And we went out and I flew with it. I've used it. Hauser's been out with it in another flight with an R22 and used it. And I think it's pretty amazing. And we've talked about it before again, you know, Foggles, they've been around forever, right? Not stupid, standard old thing you just put on your head. That Icarus device, that's a game changer as far as I'm concerned. Because for anybody that doesn't know, I guess I could. You know what? Heck, let's get out and show it to people that don't know.

That's what you were doing.

Yeah, I just was gonna show off the orange box. No, I wasn't thinking. So what's neat about this, and really, really cool is it gives you a much more. A much better idea of what's going to happen if you went inadvertent and had to try to get yourself out of the clouds. And this is. That's a great question. I'm glad you brought it up because the next video we're going to roll here shortly is called Fatal Trap. Continued flight and reduced visibility. And we're going to talk about that because this is that time of year again. But it's this device right here. So once it's turned on, this goes completely clear and you put it on a hat and you put it on your head. And this one specifically built for the R44 panel that we have in the R44. So it works perfect. So the instructor can take the app and change the visibility from, you know, unlimited visibility to 5 miles to 3 miles, down to a mile or whatever he wants to do. So much more realistic than using a pair of Foggles. The Foggles are a lot easier to change, cheat. And again, it's just either on or it's off. That's it. With this, that, the fact that the instructor can simulate even going in and out of clouds, which was much more realistic, that's what could really happen to you. You went into a lower layer of clouds by accidentally, you weren't on an IFR flight plan. You're not instrument rated, or you might be instrument rated, but let's say you just go inadvertent and then you're popping in and out of the clouds. The instructor can actually do that. So the device itself, this young man, he filled a niche for sure. And I've been excited to see how well he's done with it. I see his marketing, he does a great job with his marketing and he's online all the time and reaches out to us occasionally for stuff. And so yeah, I have heard of it, I've used it, firm believer in it. And for the price at this time when he was here, I guess it was last spring, I think it was, I think it was around 1250 bucks. But that general price range, considering we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on aircraft and as pilots and students, we spend thousands and thousands of dollars for our training, I think is super duper reasonably price priced.

So, yeah.

So if you haven't yet, email heatherelicopterground.com for your question and I mean for your wit, for the person, because that's who won the book, right?

Yes. Yeah.

What I say wrong?

Email Heather for their questions. Yeah, place your questions into live chat.

Sometimes my verbiage just gets off. So the winner. Email Heather. Thanks for the question. We'll take any others for now and then we'll get to the next video. But we got to mention this is New Year's Eve, of course. Thanks everybody for coming and thank you for everybody subscribed. We've added 600 subscribers in the last month and that's phenomenal. We haven't had 600 people subscribe in a month and I can't tell you how long. And we've been asking for this favor, just a favor to me for giving free content. And it means nothing other than, well, I'm trying to get to 50,000 subscribers. And I've been saying it means nothing. I don't get a button, I don't get money. Nothing happens when it hits 50,000. It's just I started this channel 14 years ago. Yeah, 14 years ago. And subscribers are hard, hard to come by. And so 50,000 is just a fun goal, just a personal thing for me. When it hits 50, I'm going be like, hell yeah, 50,000. So do us A favor. When you subscribe, click that notification button because that helps. And we've been having fun the last two weeks doing this live stuff. So we're going to do some more live events, get back into it again. We used to do a lot of them and then we got heavy into the helicopter addition to the online ground school, and we've been super busy with that. But now this is our slow time of the year for flying, obviously because of weather. So we've been enjoying this doing this live thing. So we're gonna do more live events coming up in January for sure. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe we might even go live tomorrow. Maybe we'll see. Santa 40 discount until. I thought it was tonight at midnight. I've been saying all week, midnight New Year's Eve. Well, Heather and Lindsey informed me that it's actually midnight New Year's Day. So you got one more day past today. So you got today and tomorrow. To save 40%, use the code Santa 40 at checkout. And if you go below this video in the description box, there's links for all the different memberships. Go to the link you're interested in, enter that code and you get 40% off through new Year's Day. And have any other questions coming up yet?

I do.

Take a quick drink here on these long, long lives. I start getting all this.

Next question is from Colleen and they want to know the best way to determine your approach angle.

Oh, oh, oh, that's a phenomenal question. You know what? We're going to pull up a video for you and we'll put it in the list here that we'll show. And we'll. We've already got the one set that we're going to play now, but we'll go add a video to follow after this next one where I did into response to this question. This is a phenomenal question. People ask this all the time. So I did a video. It's about 12 or 15 minutes long, but I get on the board and tried to draw out and get as, I don't know, descriptive as I could to help with this topic. And I'll cover it real quick now, but then we'll play the video here just shortly. Yeah. If you don't understand that approach angle, it causes you a lot of trouble. Right. And a lot of people struggle with this.

So.

Bottom line is a normal is 10 degrees, a shallow is 5 degrees, a steep is 15 degrees. So first you got to figure out that normal.

Right.

And once you figure out normal and you're comfortable with where it's at, then you can build off that to figure out what your steep and your shallow is. And once you figure out the normal, then you can figure out where in the aircraft by the way you sit in it, does it line with the top of the compass or the bottom of the compass or their top of your dash? So figuring out that 10 degrees is the first hard part. And you know, if you can imagine. And again, I'll show it to you in the video, but you know, if you can imagine looking for a blank piece of paper. But you know, one thing you can do and we, we do this in the video, describe it. But, you know, five degrees isn't very much. I'll estimate it here, you know, maybe 5 degrees, 10 degrees, 15 degrees. You can kind of imagine, if you think about it like we've even taken the E6B and laid it out and actually draw the line 5 degrees, 10 degrees, 15 degrees to give you an idea of what that'll look like, you know, from a certain distance out from for that angle to come in. So that's a great question. And again, it's. It's kind of simple, but it's hard, right? If you haven't figured it out yet, I understand why you can have be having trouble. And I had a guy call me the night before his checkride. He's in Ohio, I'm in California. And he's like, kenny, I might check rides tomorrow. And I can't figure out. I still don't understand the approaches. I'm like, oh my God. I'll do what I can over the phone to help you. But if you're. The night before, your checkride is not the time figuring out what that approach should look like. So we'll roll that video for you because I can only do so well, just live in the moment without something ready, prepared, and show and show you. So hang around and we'll show that after the Fatal Trap video. It's a good video and I just took my time with it and do a bunch of drawing to help really hone in. How do you figure out what that normal approach looks like? Great. That's a phenomenal question.

Okay, I have three more questions and then we can roll into the next video. Okay, this next question is coming from GM and they want to know if the tack required by 91.205 a rotor RPM tach or is a time tach.

Not sure I understand the question. Read it again.

Is the tack required by 91.205 a rotor RPM tack or a time tack.

Should be rotor rpms. When I can think of, you have an engine rotor, rotor, engine, rotor RPM and tach and God, I can't talk. You're gonna have engine and rotor. So on Robinson, for example, you've got. They look like this one is for your engine, one is for your rotor system and they're reading right from the engine or right from the rotor system to give you that RPM reading, if that makes sense. This if I understand the correction correctly. Not sure what a time tech is, to be quite honest.

The next question is from Elias and do you know the best glide speed of the helicopter that you operate? And do helicopters follow a normal flight pattern like a single land?

Okay, well, depending on which helicopter you're flying, you're always referring to the POH for the helicopter that you're flying. 60 works for about any helicopter. In general for a glide speed 60 to 70. However, you'd always want to refer to the manual for the specific make and model for any kind of best speed of any kind. Those are in the PoH. And what was the second part of the question?

Do helicopters follow a normal flight pattern like in a single land?

Yeah, and I'm assuming you're talking about the traffic pattern. The only difference really is for example, airplanes normally do left traffic. So in helicopters we normally do right. Normally do right traffic. Now that could change at any given airport if there's a reason why they don't want a pattern flown on either one side or the other. But however, we do the same pattern as far as upwind, crosswind, downwind, base final and airplanes are normally at a thousand feet on their downwind. Helicopters normally at 500ft in their downwind. But the patterns are technically the same helicopter patterns normally going to be a little bit smaller. Smaller than what an airplane is pattern because it's going to be. It needs more distance for takeoff and landing. But essentially the traffic pattern pretty much the same based on the same principles.

Our next question is from that guy in the sky. And it's quite a great question if you ask me. He wants to know, during your career, apart from flying into the iimc, what is the most unnerving experience you've had while flying.

Other than the getting scared flying into the clouds? Okay. The first one that pops to mind would be when I was a brand new EMS pilot, I went through the training to fly the BK117. So I'm new to the BK and they're getting ready to send me to my base to start flying. And they said but before you go to the base. We want you to take this helicopter first from Indiana, pick it up and take it to the Mayo Clinic. So I'm new to the aircraft, and I go fly up to the Mayo Clinic and that where they have the helicopters on the roof, Pretty damn tall building. And the wind that day was gusting like 50 knots. And I'll tell you what, that was super challenging. And I can remember as I'm flying the approach, the wind is just beating me to death. And if it had been an aircraft that I had a lot of time in, I'm sure I wouldn't have been as freaked out. But because I'm, you know, I'm in a state I've never flown before, I'm new to this aircraft. I don't remember how many hours I had in the training, but, you know, five or six hours, maybe, maybe ten, I can't remember. But not a lot of time in the bk. So I'm new to the twin engine, you know, EMS ship. And this wind was beating me as I'm flying this approach to the roof. And I can just remember going, okay, you know, you know how to do this. Think about the approach, how to do it, and just slow down your breathing, breathe in and out. Because it just, it was intimidating that high up in the air. Again, new aircraft, that wind gusting 50 knots. I was pretty dang nervous, and I made it. I got down to the roof and no problem. I shouldn't say no. It was no problem other than just. It was really, really tough. And I had to concentrate. And trust me, the slowing my breathing down is how I did it without just, you know, chickening out and flying away. I just like big breaths in and out, in and out. And once I got on the roof, they, they were. And I shut down. They were like, well, you know, you didn't have to do that. You could just land over there at the airport and we'd have come, picked you up and moved it later. And I'm like, oh, gee, wish I'd have been that smart. Right? So that's the first one that came to mind. You know, there's others. Dudamos killed me when I was a brand new CFI and a bad 180 auto and there'd be others. But you asked for the one that would be. That was the first one that came to mind, was 50 knots of wind flying a BK to the rooftop of the Mayo Clinic.

Yep.

Okay.

This last question kind of came in real last minute, so I'll ask it really quickly. It's again from that guy in the sky and he wants to know if you joined the LAPD as a helicopter pilot, do you already need to be a part of the police force or would they accept contract pilots?

This could have changed from the way it used to be. I know when I was first to this career, that was my dream. I wanted to fly for law enforcement and LAPD was my dream. That was my dream started back in the 80s when I saw the movie Blue Thunder. That was, that was the dream. But at that time, back when I was getting my ratings and I checked into that, you had to be a road officer for a certain amount of time. You had to, you know, get hired by the police department, work the road, get a certain amount of time under your belt before you could transition to the aviation unit. Now that could have changed because that was many years ago, but that's the way it was back when I was looking into the that sort of thing when I was first getting into it and checking out all the different requirements for police departments. At that time, you did have to be a road officer and get time under your belt before you could transfer to the aviation unit. Okay, good question. So we'll again we'll roll this video. And this is from Brian Rutledge, who's our operations manager, 30 year aviator helicopter and airplanes. Ran an aviation unit out in California for many, many years. He was the chief pilot and chief instructor. This is a really good video and it's a good content right now considering the conversations we've been having about inadvertent imc. So if you got that ready Lindsay, let's go ahead and roll.

Alright, today we are going to talk about continued flight in reduced visual conditions. I'm Brian Rutledge, I'm the operations manager with helicopter online ground school. I was in law enforcement aviation for 15 years, spent 25 years in the sheriff's office and went to work for Kenney full time Helicopter Online ground school. This one particular topic is something that's very serious in the helicopter industry as well as the fixed wing industry. People get themselves in trouble all the time flying in reduced visual conditions. So how bad can it really be? Have you ever flown in conditions that were reduced in visibility? I have and I'll tell you, it was a very uncomfortable feeling. This particular flight that we're going to talk about today was a training flight for the agency that I work for and we were going up to the Sierra Nevadas just east of Sacramento and it was in the summertime and you can see in this first photo that there's some smoke, that's actually smoke from wildfires in California that summer. It happened to be really, really bad like most years around here. When we first took off from Sacramento, visibility was fine, ceilings were clear, and as we continued east, the visibility slowly started to degrade. Now in this picture here, you can see the sun is right in our face as we're heading east. It was early in the day and that was playing a big role on the visibility that was reduced from our vantage point. Now, I'll tell you from here, if you look straight down while you were in flight, you could see the ground easily. It was a thin layer of smoke that progressively got thicker the further east we traveled. We started discussing our options. Were we going to be able to continue the flight or were we going to need to either turn around or go land somewhere? So me and my partner here are discussing those options. But we also had in the back of our minds, you know, we've got 11 passengers sitting in the back that are expecting us to make the right decisions, and that's really what it comes down to. So we continued on to the originally planned landing zone, which was up in the, up in the Sierra Mountains, about 10,500 foot elevation. And as we continued, I started to notice that that mission mindset was starting to creep in. You know, we've made this plan, we've been working on it for several weeks to a month. Everybody's there. We're trying to get up to this particular location so that the day can go as planned. And so me and my partner discussed it, we decided we'll continue on. So we ended up getting to the actual location.

And.

This is something that slowly started to creep into my mind as well. We're getting ourselves into a trap. And that trap is continuing in reduced visibility conditions. And if you end up losing the horizon at any point in time, it's that spatial disorientation that can creep in. And that's something that typically results in a loss of control type accident. And I knew that my partner knew it, talking about all these different things.

So.

As we continued on, I'm looking at these mountains that are all over the place. We're talking 9,000, 10,000, 11,000 foot peaks, and we're flying around these mountains that are very difficult to see. And you start talking about loss of control and the result that comes from that is pilots impact terrain while they're trying to maneuver the aircraft, and that's the last thing any pilot wishes for themselves. So when you talk about Impacting terrain. You talk about cfit and for those of you who've been around the aviation industry for a long time, you know, CFIT is controlled flight into terrain. And that's basically just a pilot flying a perfectly good aircraft, has no idea what is about to happen. And they either crash into a mountain, hit an obstacle, crash into the water, there's no loss of control, they are just flying and they strike something. And that's usually because of reduced visibility that they're flying in. The other one is U fit and that's uncontrolled flight into terrain. That is where a pilot either has a mechanical failure of some type and the aircraft is uncontrollable, or, or the pilot loses control of the helicopter themselves. So in reduced visibility conditions, they've lost the horizon, they've got spatial disorientation, they're not paying attention to their instruments to stay straight and level and they lose control of the aircraft and they crash. That's uncontrolled flight. There's many risks associated with flying in reduced visual conditions, I'm sure we're all very aware of those. But the biggest one is the loss of control. Pilots do this time and time again instead of flying the aircraft, they lose control of the aircraft and they crash. Becoming disoriented, you know, you have this reduced reaction time to see and avoid terrain or obstacles when you become disoriented and you're trying everything you can to maintain control of the aircraft, but you're spending more time worried about what's going on. As far as I can't see, there's no visibility. So your reaction time when an obstacle appears is severely reduced. And that's where becoming disoriented or off your pre planned route creates problems in possibly impacting terrain or an obstacle. Pilot reaction time is reduced anytime you're flying around and reduced visibility and you have an aircraft maintenance issue. Pilots tend to become distracted with this issue. Maybe it's a mechanical issue, maybe they're hearing something that doesn't sound right with the engine or the rotor system and they're really paying attention to that. But yet they don't have good visibility outside. They start to get lower and lower because of the weather and eventually they impact terrain unsuspectingly. Pilot fails to adequately understand the weather conditions that resulted in the reduced conditions in the first place. So doing a proper pre flight briefing at the very beginning and knowing what the conditions are or what they're possibly going to become while en route is extremely important. And then pilots, a lot of Times they have a breakdown in good aeronautical decision making. So the decision making starts at the very beginning, from pre planning the route to departing, to continuing the flight, making the decision to turn around or to land. Pilots who find themselves in reduced visibility tend to stop using good aeronautical decision making at times. And that's how cfit youth that happens to pilots. Failure to just simply turn around and avoid deteriorating conditions when first able. Have pre planned decision points along your route. So if you take off and the weather is flyable, but yet, you know, maybe there's a weather system that is supposed to come in, plan some decision points along that route that if the weather turns such that you shouldn't continue beyond this point, turn around, go back, find the nearest airfield or just land, just land somewhere. And that's the big one. Pilots just fail to simply land the helicopter. They're more worried about what people are going to think than actually protecting themselves and passengers that are on board. Now back to that training flight where we were at. Here's just a screenshot of a VFR sectional and you'll see in the middle, the private airport, Bear Valley. Ultimately, that's where we ended up going. We were due to continue a little further east of that airfield, just a little further. But because the smoke was so thick and the mountain peaks were so high, we could see the peaks, but the visibility was really restricted because of the sun was reflecting off of that smoke, made it very difficult to see. So we made the decision to go back to Bear Valley and we landed there. We sat it out for about two and a half hours and waited for the smoke to clear. This picture here, this was on final approach to the little airfield and it's kind of hard to tell in the picture. The sun is still kind of shining there out in the background. So it looks a little hazy, but we had great visibility. Once we got below that smoke layer. The problem was where we needed to go. We needed to be in the smoke at that altitude for our planned lz and that just wasn't going to be possible. So we stayed there for a couple hours and smoke started to clear out and we completed the flight, had a great training day. It was beautiful up there and no harm, no foul, but we learned some lessons with it. But let's talk about this real quick. The Kauai helicopter crash in December, this past December, this was a tourist flight. Seven people on board, including the pilot. They all were killed. Witnesses at the time reported that there was adverse weather. I pulled up the NTSB report and I looked at it. And sure enough, the helicopter struck the mountain at about, I think they said, 3,003ft. But there was also a special weather report was issued during that flight and winds were 350 at 102 1/2 statute miles. Rain and mist and then an overcast layer at 3,000ft. He struck the mountain at 3,003ft. So was this weather related? Absolutely it was. Was it preventable? Absolutely. Was this C fit or U fit? Well, if. Kind of hard to say. I mean, we weren't there. But if he was in complete control of that aircraft and he just didn't see that mountain and he flew straight into it, then that would be controlled flight into terrain. If he did something, lost control of the aircraft and spiraled down and hit the ground, losing control, then that would have been ufit. Either way, it's a problem that could have been avoided by simply staying out of the weather. Next one, the one we're all very familiar with, the Kobe Bryant crash in January of 2020. Nine people killed in that crash. We're all very familiar with that dense fog. Lapd, they stayed on the ground because of the fog. The pilot requested special vfr, and the report was initially that the helicopter struck the ground while descending at about 4,000ft per minute. That's moving weather at Van Nuys airport, according to the NTSB report, which was about 14 miles northeast of the crash site. Eleven hundred feet, overcast ceiling and two and a half statute miles visibility. Weather related? I believe so. So do you ever try to convince yourself it looks like it might clear up today? I want to go flying. I really want to go flying bad. Have you done it? I have. I've done it on many occasions. I found shortly after taking off, I had to land. So my question is, do you have personal minimums? Do you have any personal minimums? We talk about, you know, you set a maximum. I won't fly if the ceiling is such. I won't fly if the visibility is less than five miles. I won't fly if the wind is in excess of 20 knots. You know something, the newer pilots, your minimums are probably going to be much higher than a seasoned, experienced pilot. That's not to say that the longer you fly, you can change those minimums with experience that you've gained and updated training, staying on top of emergency procedures and those things. Sure, you can change your personal minimums, but have something, have some kind of a minimum that says, no, I'm not going to go fly. This particular picture here, this was another flight during smoky conditions and Sacramento and we're about three, about four miles from downtown Sacramento. When I took off on this flight initially VFR and we had clear skies, the fires erupted, the wind was blowing just right, blew all that smoke in about 30 minutes later we were down to just above three miles of visibility, just barely three miles. And by the time I landed, 10 minutes, 15 minutes after I landed, I went in and checked the, checked the Metar and it was showing the field had gone ifr. So the whole area went IFR in a very short amount of time. So if I was a pilot that was maybe on a cross country flight and I was not familiar with the Sacramento area, I could see where you could get yourself into a lot of trouble flying into an area and all of a sudden you go from clear skies to IFR conditions in a rather short amount of time. This here was something that one of my prior flight instructors had taped up on his office wall. And I think it sums it up pretty good. What pilots, instructors, supervisors, all have the responsibility. When you're dealing with pilots and talking about your experiences, the do's and don'ts in aviation type thing, I would say, you know, you got to follow your personal minimums, do a thorough pre flight briefing every single time, have those pre planned decision points and always, always, always, no matter what, fly the aircraft. Doesn't matter. You know, if you get yourself into situation that you know the pressure's on, you've got, you know, reduced visibility or whatever is going on, you have any kind of a mechanical failure of whatever, fly the aircraft. Don't become another NTSB report that says it was a loss of control accident or a CFIT accident or a U fit accident. Fly the aircraft all the way to the ground, Fly the aircraft. We got to reach as many pilots as we can regarding the importance especially of making good go or no go decisions. And finally, it's always okay to say no. Just say no.

Okay. We had one question hanging in there from last time camafoot. Somebody asked favorite acronyms. And that's just probably the one that's sticks in my head. The, the best compass, airspeed, manifold pressure, altimeter, fuel gauge, oil pressure, oil temperature, tachometer. And the reason I say that is as basic as that is everybody has to know that for your checkrides, right? And no matter who it is that comes in the door, most the time they're coming here getting ready for a test and they're pretty close being ready. And when I ask that question, most people struggle to get through that required equipment, equipment.

So we'll.

We'll pick camafoot and.

Slow.

Just lost my train of thought again.

Oh.

So for another round of questions. So for next person to type in a flight or ground training helicopter question, you're going to get top 10 checkride tips. We'll ship this out to you. And this is a good book to lead into our next video. And it's about fear of failure. And it's with. From the Coffee with Kenny series. And Lindsay picked this video just so you know. She looked through the archives today, and she goes, I want to play this one. And I'm like, all right, cool. That's the one you pick. So in the video, I'm going to talk about the fear of failure, right? And that's what drives most of us working for our helicopter ratings. Nobody wants to fail, Right? So the next video is on fill a failure. So the next question wins this. Any. Any questions?

Not yet.

Not yet.

Okay, real quick. We want To Plug Ask Hogs.com. i didn't mention that. In the last video, we have ask hogs.com free service to anybody. There's a link down below. You can click on it. You can type questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or you can click the phone button and you can speak your questions to my clone. And the clone will give you a response. And I'd say definitely 95% and higher. It answers with some really good answers, and most of the time it will surprise you. We've. I get a report every day from the cologne on the types of questions that people are asking. And the only thing that doesn't do well with is like, somebody said, hey, how many miles from this airport to this airport?

Right?

Like, we haven't fed sectional charts into it. Into it. So it's not going to ask answer specific questions about sectional charts. Our clone has built off 14 years of my digital content. Blogs, podcast videos, paid content, YouTube content. It's all in there. And you can go and talk on this, to this thing. And right now, it's unlimited. At some point, we'll probably have to limit the amount of free, you know, questions that you can ask it. And then at some point, it goes to a paid level, but for now, it's free. So Ask Hogs.com is down below in the box, and free PDFs. You can get either one of these as a free PDF. Both of these are below, so you can download those immediately. And that way you'll be in our email list and you'll be notified of future events, things that we'll be doing when we go live and do giveaways.

And first question and winner of the book. Book goes to that guy in the sky and he wants to know, when landing in a confined area, do you use the four S's or the sixes or the fours or the sixes?

I think everybody has different ones. I think, I think ours was like the 5s or 6s's, but.

As long.

As you're using the whole, the scheme of the surface, like what is the surface? Size, size, slope, shape. What are the other ones? Size, slope, surface, shape. That's four I can think of. I think we use five or six. I think there's another one in there that's in our memory aid, but I'm drawing a blank on that right now. What else?

How many jobs are available to commercial and non CFI pilots from Rico911?

That's a, that's a good question. That question comes up a lot. Most of the available jobs out there, at least for low time people, there are more CFI jobs than anything. The industry is backwards. You'd think instructors would all be high time people, but most instructors are newbies. They've just got started, haven't been flying that long. Majority of the time with low time, the commercial jobs are a lot harder. Harder to get. Then of course, as you build time in the helicopter for your commercial rating, the more time you get as a commercial pilot, the more jobs that will open up. And it's very simply because those CFI jobs, most of them, you can get as low time. So as you get more and more, you get to the 500 hour range, the thousand, the 1500-2000, as you go up an hour hours more and more and more those jobs open up. And particularly EMS is usually around 2000 hours. So you can kind of see how a lot of times like say a tour job will come available at 500 and then maybe a pipeline patrol at a thousand. Or I'm just throwing out random examples. But as you build more time, more opportunities open up in the commercial. Okay.

From Karnak R. He wants to know the minimum IFR speed for an R44.

Couldn't tell you. This is the one area that would like to have Hauser come along and do one of these lives with us and do some IFR stuff. I haven't flown IFR training and I haven't flown IFR. And since like 2010, I specialize in private commercial CFI, the nuts and bolts instrument training. We are looking at getting an instrument instrument trainer we may be upgrading and Hauser will be doing all that instrument work for us. But I guess I kind of enjoyed the instrument training. But you know I got the rating because I needed it for the jobs that I wanted to get and I needed it for the EMS flying I did for five years. But since I've left EMS I've only had VFR helicopters. I haven't had any VFR trainers and I don't actively teach instruments so can't answer that one.

Okay, what about this one from Bill? If you only had to fly one instrument, what would it be?

If I only had to fly one instrument, wow. I don't know. Never thought about that. I guess because I do VFR flying the one I wouldn't want to be without would probably be the number one would probably be RPM air speed. You can kind of gauge vsi. You can just fly a normal slow approach by the seat of your pants Attitude indicator. If I was going to be flying if I was flying IFR attitude indicator but for just VFR flying I guess the one that I wouldn't want to be without would be the tachometer.

This next question is coming from Mark and he wants to know as someone from Germany are they allowed to fly with the US PPL H.

US PPLH.

I'm assuming a US private pilot license. I'm just not sure what the H helicopter you can.

You should be able to do a conversion. I I helped one of my he's remains one of my good close friends was a helicopter instructor military pilot in Germany and I helped him convert his CFI in US And I think he had to take a check ride for that specific but his military you know training in Germany County. I don't know for ppl you should probably. You should be able to do a conversion if you have the requirements. I haven't done much of that but there's. I forget what they call like the compact states or whatever there are. There are certain countries that you can come and convert your license and I would imagine Germany would probably be one of them. So I hopefully I'm answering answering your question. I think that's what you're asking. Can you convert your German license to a US license? I believe you can.

Next question. And then we can roll into your day 56 coffee with Kenny. This is also coming from that guy in the sky and they want to know for autos to the ground how often do we change out the tungsten block on the skids?

The skid plate should be something Checked on a normal pre flight, especially if you're doing a lot of pull downs and that's something that's just a visual check, keeping an eye on them. That's why a lot of times when we drop the helicopter off for maintenance, the mechanics will say, have you been doing many full down autos? Right? They, they want to know that if you've been doing that because they know that they need to check those skid shoes. I don't know, especially as far as if there's a like, you know, acceptable measurement for any specific helicopter. But you can visually check and do they look nice and thick? Are they getting thin? And if they would be getting thin, of course you'd want to replace them. So that's pretty much a visual check. And this next video we're gonna play the approach video. After this video, we said we'd play it next, but we're downloading it and for whatever reason it's taking a little extra time to download. So we'll play that video video after this video when we come back and we'll do another giveaway on this next one. Should we do the, should we do this on the next one, Lindsay?

Yeah.

Should we save it for a little bit?

Well, I, I'd say we can give away our zip up hoodie.

Okay, so when we come back, we are going to do zip up hoodie just like this one. We only have one left. It's a 2XL. So that's it. It's brand new. It's been over here. It's the last of that shoe shipment. So we'll do that on the next live.

It just downloaded.

It just downloaded.

It just downloaded. We'll roll in with coffee with Kenny and then we'll set up.

Helicopter approaches okay, so again, this is a good video. If you're concerned about the check ride and you're worried about the fear of failure, this is the video for you. So we'll roll that and we'll.

Good morning. I gotta try and do this fast. It's cold out here. Gotta get this done before I start shivering. I wanted to share the sunrise with you today. And it's awesome. Seven years online today. Happy birthday to helicopter online ground school.

My favorite cup.

I'm reverting back. I normally introduce a new cup but I want to use my favorite cup today. Fear of failure on your checkride. That's why we're here. That's probably why you're watching this video. It's how you got started watching our videos. Or maybe you just found Our videos. Now, I've been making them for 10 years, but today is seven years online ground school. Fear of failure, fear of checkride failure. It's what drives all of us, right? It's why I make videos. It's why I created helicopter online ground school. I struggled like every single one of you out there that struggles and worries about a check ride, okay? It is a lot of hype, right? And I built online ground school because I struggled like you do or you have or you will, learning all the information there is to know to become a helicopter pilot. It is like a college degree. It's like a mini college degree, but you're not really getting, you know, college type instruction most of the time. Some schools, like, you know, there are some schools that have 141 programs or even part 61s that have really excellent ground schools. But many places you go, it's one guy, one instructor. Some young guy who doesn't really care about you getting your rating. He just wants hours in his logbook. Come on, that's. That's the real deal, right? We know most people, not most, a lot of instructors don't really care. A lot of structures aren't that good. They might be good in the aircraft, but not that good with the ground school or they just don't want to teach it, okay?

So.

I failed my first checkride from my fear of failure. I was so hyped, I was so freaked out. I was so damn scared that I did have pretty good knowledge and I was pretty good in the aircraft. But the overwhelm of that stupid check ride just.

I mean, I was flabbering around in.

The check, in the oral portion. I didn't even get through the oral and I knew the material, but I was, you know, having retreating brain stall and I was having a panic attack. And, you know, you're sitting there across from a guy. I took it with a guy from the faa. First tip, use a designated examiner if possible. The guy from the FAA works for the faa. He's getting paid regardless. This is sad reality, but a designated examiner, I shouldn't say they're going to be easier on you, but you're paying them, right? There's a difference. And I learned that early on. My instructor said, well, hey, you know, you can save money by doing it with the faa. And I was like, you know, like, I was like a lot of you, I didn't have. I was struggling to pay for every single helicopter hour. So when I thought, well, I can.

Take it with the FA for free. Okay, I'll do that.

And, you know, I'd love to see this guy, you know, now, 20 years later, and tell him, thank you for failing me because it's created a business, you know, well, seven years online now. So it created it 13 years ago because when I failed my first checkride, I had to study my ass off before I went back to test again. And there was no online ground school. The only training out there was for fixed wings, fixed wing. And nothing wrong with fixed wing training, right? But I was flying a helicopter. I don't want to watch fixed wing training when I'm trying to learn how to fly helicopters. I remember driving down the road going, man, I wish there was something I could listen to, you know, an audio or cassette tape or something, you know, dvd. Because I was driving.

I had both in the car, right?

I could have listened to either.

There was nothing. There was nothing for freaking helicopter pilots.

And I failed my first checkride.

It was up to me to go.

Back and finish it. And I put together my own notebook after I failed. You know, it took me six months.

Before I went back. And at the time, I was working.

As a police officer, and one of my. I was training a new officer one night, and we became pretty good friends. And he was like, well, when are you gonna go back and finish this helicopter thing? Six months after I had failed, right? And I'm like, you know what? I need to get up back on that. Damn it. So I went down to the local drugstore, bought me a notebook, and I went home. And I just started taking all the notes because I'd flown a couple different places. I'd flown a Schweitzer, I'd flown an R22. I had different notes from here, different notes from there, different notes from this instructor. And I had all these books piled on the kitchen table. And it was like, you get overwhelmed. You don't know what to study. You don't know what to do. It's like, oh, my God. So only thing I could do is I thought, I got to create something here.

We didn't know that 20 years later.

It was going to be where we're at today. I sat down and I created my own notebook, my own study notebook. And I just sat down with every single note I had, every book I had marked up. And I started in the beginning of the notebook with the things that I struggled the most remembering. And when I felt that checkride, the FAA examiner said, when I ask you about selling with power, I want to hear 30, 2010 rated sent you know.

21St hundred hour, blah, blah, blah, right?

He's like, you struggled on that and you kind of stumbled through it. I want to know when I ask you a question like selling with power, you need to know. And I want, and this should be just nice and smooth and roll right out of your mouth. I don't want to come in and investigate your accident. That's what he told me. He said, you need to know this stuff so that when you're out there on your own and you get into trouble, you know what to do. And it hurt when I failed. I mean, it hurt so bad. God, Driving home with my tail to my legs, just so frustrated with myself. So anyway, I created this notebook and I studied that damn thing and I.

Studied it and I studied it.

But again, I arranged everything in the notebook. I made it for me. I didn't make it for anybody else. I made it for me. And when I went back and retested the examiners, like, I don't know, we're probably half ways or three quarters through the oral. And he goes, let's stop for a second, take a little break here. He goes, you brought a pink slip with you today. And I go, yeah, I did. And he goes, I don't understand what the problem is here. He goes, because you're hitting everything 100%. And I said, well, because of that failure, I studied my ass off and I built my own notebook and I just studied that thing because I was not going to fail again. I was not going to fail again. And he said, well, you know what, the examiner world is pretty small. And he said, I'm going to call this examiner to let him know that you came back all this time later and how well you did. And that made me feel really good, right? That this examiner was going to call the original examiner just to let him know that I did eventually come back and that I did really well. And I'm gonna go ahead and say his name. Jerry Ventrella, legend in the flipping industry, right? Amazing. And even though I passed, I mean, he was like a four hour oral for my private.

Jerry is very thorough.

But, you know, two hours is that two hours of that is him telling you, you know, war stories, man. And the guy is just this wealth of knowledge, just amazing, amazing examiner. And he taught me so many things between my private and commercial checkride, because he. No, he was more than just an examiner. He was a teacher. And he showed me stuff on these checkrides that I'm using today in helicopter online ground school. I mean, he Showed me good stuff. And when you have a guy like Jerry Ventrella, you know, a legend, right, says, I want you to teach this exactly like this. Here's how you need to do a normal approach. Not like this, yo, yo, over here. Does it, this is how it needs to be done. Or on takeoffs, you know, the high velocity diagram is what you need to be looking at, you know, and all these things that, that he was really strong or really, you know, ingrained in me, I've held today. So when somebody makes an argument with me on some certain subject, I think back to Jerry Ventrella, right? Here's a legend that taught me these things. And I thought, I'm pretty much sure that I'm pretty good to go on my explanation of this particular topic. When you have a legend, tells you, da da da da da, right? So I created Helicopter and Language Ground School. Launched it seven years ago today. Happy birthday. I rushed around this morning, I wanted to have the video as the sun was coming up. Because every one of you has got your own struggles. We all struggle through life, right? But failure can be such a wonderful thing, right? As much as that first failure hurt, it was the best thing that ever happened to me because of creating my notebook and because of going back and making the second time. And then over the years I was using that notebook, I can remember Jed. And I'll put the link down below for jed flies the MD500 cutting and sawing trees. Maybe I'll even include a little link in here when I'm editing. Either way, I'll put the link down below. My video Jon Jed has 3 million views, right? Well, when this kid was young and working with me on his private. We're going around and around the pattern one day and he's like, man, you're really good at training. You should start your own training manual.

And I'm like, yeah, whatever, right?

Well, that was 20 years ago. And other people would say that to me and they're like, you know, you got kind of got this down. You really ought to make your own manual or something. So it was kind of a joke for a long time. And then seven years ago today, I launched helicopter only Ground school because of working in the industry for 13 years. Prior to that, nothing was coming along for helicopters. It was all fixed wing stuff. So a buddy of mine named Nick Logan came along. I was working as an EMS pilot flying the EC135. And my buddy Nick Logan comes in and he was also an Internet marketer and he's like, you know, What? You should take your knowledge and you should put it on an online ground school. And he goes, I've had the thought. But you know, he was going a different direction with his Internet marketing. He goes, so you should do something. And Nick inspired me with this little camera. I wish I had it here. Well, I showed it in the video yesterday. Nick inspired me and loaned me that damn camera years ago, right? And actually started using it to promote my little helicopter business. That was failing anyway. Doesn't matter now, right? Another big failure in my life was the owning a helicopter and trying to make a small flight school go. And as much as it still even kind of hurts today, it was part of the story. It's part of how I got to where I'm at. And I was so broke for the longest time that it's not even funny. And now I can sit here, a beautiful day, make a video for you sitting on my deck next to the channel that goes out to a beautiful lake right over here. And it's not a mansion, but it's, it's. I have a nice house. I got an old pontoon, bought an old cheapy, you know, didn't spend a lot of money on it.

I live high on the hog, but.

I have a roof over my head now. And I didn't even have that for a lot of years. A lot of years I stayed with family. You know, I was so broke in the beginning, even in the beginning of online ground school, you guys don't know how bad it was. I was living with my sister, driving my sister's car, and she was unemployed and loaning me gas money to get to the airport in her car.

That's how bad it was.

And I'm not kidding you, that was from the helicopter running me into the ground and basically lost everything that I ever owned. So fear of failure, we all fell. Take it, use it. And now you don't have to fail your checkride. You can smoke your checkride.

Look at that.

Sun's coming up. I better finish this video up.

I'm face is gonna keep getting darker and darker.

That's why I created helicopter online. Ground school is to give a person a place to go. And it works. I. In the beginning, I called it checkride preparation. Now it's full fledged ground school. In the beginning it was just tips.

And I'm at home.

I wish I had the video. The first, my very first customer ever, seven years ago, he bought before the buttons were live on the site. And me and my buddy was out in the hangar. I Still owned that helicopter that basically ruined me. And I'm making a video and I'm.

Broke and my girlfriend, my high school.

Sweetheart had just broken up with me. You know, I'd reunited with her after.

Many years and that didn't work out.

And I'm mad at the world, right? And I'm on the hangar, something happens and I'm cussing. And when we laugh and joke about it later this video, I was going to edit out the me cussing and Ran and Raven and somehow, you know, I put it on YouTube but I meant to be unlisted so I could edit it later, whatever. This video goes live. I don't realize it. And my first online ground school member bought even though he sees this unedited video of me and Hanger launching online ground school when I'm mad and I'm complaining about my life and frustrated and cussing. Oh, it was horrible. And I'll have to find that, play that guys for you guys sometime and edit out the beep or beep the you know, the filthy language. But that's, that's where I was at when I started this and it's funny now, right? And God, where am I going with that other than failure can breed success, man. And that's why you don't have to struggle like I did. I did this to help people.

Get through the checkride.

You can use online ground school to supplement your training. No matter what you're doing, whether you got, you can have the best instructor. But maybe you just want to watch videos at home in your pajamas, eating cereal, drinking coffee in the morning. You know, that's what helicopter line ground school is for. Or it's also for if you're not getting the best ground instruction. I give it my all right. I have for seven years. You got the story now. I struggled. I, you know, like all of you man, it's just, that's why it's here. So happy birthday. God. I see as I'm in, I'm at 14 minutes.

Gee, many Christmas. I guess I better wrap it up.

Getting cold out here. Didn't think I'd make it this long. Thank you everyone. Every single one of your comments helps every single person that buys a monthly membership helps anything comment and like and sharing, emailing me, cheering me on. I have bad days too like the rest of you but I have days like this where I'm watching the sun come up, making a video for all of you on my on the seven year birthday of helicopter land ground school. So the biggest sell is on March 1st today, celebrating the launch of Helicopter Line Ground School seven years ago. And it's going to my birthday March 15th. Biggest sale I've ever had, the most days I've ever had and the most money off I've ever offered. It's never been this big. Heather told me no. She kept telling me no in the office and I'm like, no, I'm doing it, you know. And she's going, I don't think she should do. That's a lot of that's you're losing money. I'm like, no, I'm not. It's all in the good. And our operations manager Brian Rutledge, I just noticed he come on a video last night and he said, good for you, Kenny. Happy seven years and you're giving back to the industry. So I guess I did all right. Got the approval from operations manager Brian Relige. All right, please give me a like and a share. Please give me a comment down below. Go check out helicopter online ground school down below helicopterground.com link descriptions box below. Go check out the big, go check out the big discounts because they're pretty darn huge. Give me a like please. Thumbs up like. Share comment. You know the drill. Subscribe. Click the bell and we might see another might see another video later today. But see you tomorrow morning for another coffee with Kenny.

Okay. All right. We're going to play a couple of those old videos that I just talked about. We're going to play those in just a bit, but the next video will be the one we promised a little bit ago on the approaches. We're going to play that one or play that one next. So before we get to that we'll answer some more questions. And I want to mention hogspaysme.com we have an affiliate program. It's been in place for quite a while. We just recently started really kind of letting people know about it. Anybody can earn 50%. This is mainly geared for instructors but any member could earn money. If you believe in hogs, you can earn money by signing up to become an affiliate. It's really simple process. You sign up@hogs pays me.com which that links down below the video and you'll actually get access to the admin of our site. And you'll see as long as you share your link and the person buys, you'll see your 50% commissions and we pay after 30 days because we have a 30 day refund policy. So example, somebody buys propilot that is at $2800 and that's been there for several years. We've had several instructors that their student bought a pro pilot. We sent them after 30 days $1400 to their PayPal. So you do need a PayPal account and an email associated with your, your PayPal account. But you can earn 50% for instructors. You don't have any money. We know this. Most of you, you're living on ramen noodles and you're driving a piece of junk car because you can't afford a car. That's unfortunately the way instructors are starting out. So this is a great way for you to earn money is sign your students up with your affiliate link and we pay you 50%. It's a freaking good deal. So we'll mention that and then. And right now, as of now, Santa 40 is 40% off. Private pilot, instrument pilot, commercial pilot, certified flight instructor, and pro pilot. Those links are below. You enter the code Santa40 and you can save 40% up until midnight New Year's Day. All week I've been saying New Year's Eve, but the girls informed me it's actually New Year's Day at 11:59pm New Year's Day. So you got today and tomorrow. Sign up for that 40%. And let's see. Did we give away. What are we giving away now?

The hoodie.

Okay. We're giving away the hoodie. Oh.

So I need a question.

Okay. Oh, God. What can we do real quick? Anybody got any ideas? Oh, let's make it easy. Proper spelling. Spelling. I want you to type in the title of this book right here. This book. I'm going to show you the title here in just a minute, but you may already know. I'll just show you. Spell properly. Title of this book. This has over 400 questions that you can be asked on a private podcast. Pilot Quest Checkride. We'll put a link down below for this book. Over 80 pages. Over 400 questions you could be asked on a private pilot checkride. So type in the title. Proper spelling, proper spaces, please. Okay. I see Lindsey shaking her head.

I am shaking my head because the person has just been spamming the chat saying they want the hoodie, they want the hoodie and they got the hoodie. It is GMC TV. If they want to email heatherelicopterground.com with their shipping address and we will get that hoodie off to them.

There you go. That, and that is a 2x. It's the last one we have. It's our last zip up hoodie. It's time for us to Replenish our stock. We have nothing left over there other than we have one. We have one dress jacket over there. Hmm, let me think about that one. That's all we have left in our stock. We don't have any T shirts, no more sweaties. One dress jacket over there is all we have left. All right, so hogs pays me. We got the sale going on until New Year's night. Any other questions?

Let me. Yes. What is your opinion? In your opinion, a percentage of success fail rate for private pilot checkride coming in from Craig.

Wow.

On average, I couldn't really tell you. I could only make a guess. For me, in 24 years, I've only had four people fail. And I don't know the exact amount of checkrides I've done, but it's a lot. It's definitely over 100. It's got to be more closer to 200. I mean, I remember I used to keep track of it and I've done a lot of check rides in 24 years, and I've only had four people fail. And all four of those did come back with a little extra training, come back and all finished up. I don't know what like a national average would be. I've never seen that thrown out there. I would say, you know, a good majority of them passes. You know, depends on the. Depends on where you're going. So, you know, the answer could be. I don't think you have a blanket answer for that because we know we have reputable schools out there. Let me, let me go this direction with this. I complain a lot about the quality of instruction going on out there. And we see it and we hear it. I hear it from the examiners. I hear about people showing up at checkrides that aren't very well prepared. Prepared. However, there are lots of schools out there that do a really good job, and there's individual instructors out there that do a good job. And there's a lot of flight schools out there that crank people out with high success rates and do really, really well. So, you know, when I complain, don't think I'm saying it's everybody in the industry, because it's not. There are plenty of flight schools out there that are cranking out people with a. On a really good average. And, you know, it's. There's got to be a certain amount of failure. Right. If everybody passed, then people wouldn't try as hard. Right. Because that fear of failure is what makes you deal do well or is what make. What makes you should make you do? Well, it's how I said in the last video it inspired me to create what I have now. That first failure on the private. It hurt, man. That hurt. So I can't really say. You know, again, at a. At a really reputable flight school, when they try really hard, I would imagine. I don't know. I know our examiner said he told us the figures and he said. I wish I remember what he said recently. He said he told us about how many check rides a year he does and about how many failures there were. And I can't remember the exact numbers, but I thought it was low. Right. And he's a. He's a very thorough examiner. He's not easy, but the amount of failures he talked about was low. It wasn't. Wasn't high. So wild guess. But again, it goes back to depends on what school you're talking about. You'd have great success, right? Or success. Success rate. I know there's places like for example, and it depends on the rating, too. I don't know if you asked private or not, but I know that the examiner that I did my CFI with. No, I'm sorry, let me back up. Examiner. I did my private with, the one that I failed. He was an FAA examiner. I was told ahead of time that he fails 50%, so. So there's one end of the spectrum where half the people fail. And I heard that about Tim Tucker too, back in the day when I did my cfi, they said about half the people that go through don't pass the first time. So best guess on an average, I don't know.

Okay, we're gonna go back up in the chat. How did you get involved with ems?

For me, EMS was not the dream. I mean, of course I was. I was fascinated by it. Right. I'll admit, when I was I. I started at a young age being interested in helicopters. Then I became got in law enforcement in my early 20s. And of course we would call the local helicopter at the time it was called Samaritan, still is still one of the local ones. And they flew dolphins. So when we would call them to an accident, you know, I would rush out and. And wait for the helicopter to arrive or even if it was going to cruise through the area. I'd drive out to the overpass just because I wanted to see this thing fly over. But I can remember landing on the hospital, landing on the highway for an accident. I remember going out to the accident just like I knew I was always interested in him. But seeing him landing like that really kind of struck a chord with me. And for a while I lived here in Warsaw near the airport. And whenever I would hear an EMS helicopter landing, I drive over the airport so I could watch them land. And because I, you know, was gung ho, of course. So that's would have been the inspiration I wanted to fly for a police department was my goal. But after the years of, well, I've already mentioned it, basically went bank, almost bankrupt. Becoming a cfi, right, you have no money left by the time you're done, start working in the industry. Worked five years probably before I got into ems. So you drain all your money that you've got to become a cfi, then you go work a low paying job for years. So about five years after being an instructor, I was tired of living with nothing. And what could I do locally that could make me at least a decent paycheck was EMS. And even though I started in 2005, 2004, I think mid 2000s, I started at 46,000 a year. And after five years I left at 56,000 a year. So that's not big money. But compared to what I was making, it was a lot of money. So to me that was a lot of money per year. So I went to EMS for the stability, for the paycheck. And that's, that's the honest to God truth. That's why I went to it. And in the beginning I thought of course it was cool, right? Flying six million dollar aircraft and yeah, good maintenance. And there was a lot of good that went on in that and I'm glad I got to do it. Great experience. But after five years I'd had enough. And that's a story for another day. You know, I'd go work at Lowe's and drive a fork truck now before I'd go back to ems. By the end of five years I hated it that much. And you'll hear that a lot. A lot of people get in it and laugh. Last three to four to five years and by the end they're like, okay, enough for me. I'd much rather go out and either not specifically the R22, but the R44 that we have. Way more fun going out and doing autos and quick stops and teaching people and helping them get to a rating. Way more fun. Way more fun.

This next question comes from mom, shepherd flies. What's the best way to avoid getting into lte?

Phenomenal question. Great freaking question. Of course, number one is the knowledge understanding that LTE loss of tow rot effectiveness, also called Unanticipated, Right. Yaw and helicopters. Understanding the three winds, right, if you have a quartering wind from the front, blowing the turbulence from your main rotor into your tail rotor, the wind coming this way, you know, blowing right into your tail rotor where it's blowing the turbulence back in, or the wind coming from behind you because it makes you weather vane. Knowing that, number one, knowing the different conditions, right. But it's, it's about good pilot technique and how do I stay out of it? It is staying on top of the pedals, being aware of those situations. When you're in one of those winds, if you have to do it, you need to go low, stay close to the ground, go very slow and stay on top of those pedals. It a lot of times will happen due to, I'll call it a lazy, lazy pedal person, lazy pedal guy or lazy pedal girl, you're not staying on top of those pedals and you're letting it start to get away from you. So avoiding those winds, number one. And another thing that I tell people is, you know, when you're repositioning the aircraft, always think about where the wind is. And just so happens by the way we're laid out, the wind almost comes from the. Normally comes from the southwest. We know this well. Most time when we're finished and we're on the Runway, we want to come in, we're out on the Runway and to come in here, we're going to come over with a tailwind and people want to come across with the tailwind all the way. And I always tell them just take off into the wind, fly around, come do an approach over the hangar and just land right in front of the hangar. Because the whole time you're going to move from, from that spot where we usually finish up. When you travel all the way across over to here, it's probably quarter of a mile. You're going to be doing that with a tailwind. And then what do they start doing? They get tired of fighting the wind. So they'll go faster and they'll go higher. Well, then you increase the situation, you make it worse, and then you get more wacky on the pedals and you're pulling more power. And so I always say avoid those situations. And there's another good rule of thumb. Stay above 30, 30 knots. If you have to do some maneuvering near the ground, you're not up at altitude, at airspeed, and you got to maneuver from here to there, keeping above 30. If you are above 30, you will not get into LTE but for me and my gut, deep down, staying on top of the pedals, good pilot technique, staying on top of it. I can say that's one that I've knock up wood. It's never happened to me. I've never got into lte, but I've always been very, very aware of it and, and always thinking about it. Right. Like that's a part of being a good pilot is paying attention to where is the wind at all times. And if you know you have to avoid those areas if you have to, but if you have to operate in one of those ranges, low, slow rpm, top of the green, very slow, very careful, very deliberated, and stay on top of those pedals.

Next question is coming from Gifford and they want to know what is the best advice in memorizing the poh?

Oh, good question. Repetition is the only thing I can say. We have R22 and R44 specific sessions, sections built on the R22, R44 POH. And we had one of our Hogs members, Gabriel Hernandez, who's been here to visit us. He's up on the wall several times he said this in a live video. He said our R22 section was extremely helpful for him because we go through the, the POH for the R22. And he said just listening to those, even though they're kind of dry, right of boring because I'm going through and I'm reading it. He said that just listening to it over and over really helped him solidify those things in the PoH. So repetition, sitting down, opening up the book and reading it. If you don't have your own copy, I highly suggest buying a copy from Robinson. Have a copy that you can use. You can always, of course, go online and download a free PDF copy that you can, could sit and study. But that's a great question. And it's going through it and it's reviewing it. It's not just looking at it one time, it's reviewing it. You know, in that EMS environment, pilots were guilty of sitting around for a year watching tv, taking naps, and then fly when they have to. Nobody ever opens up a poh. Not, I shouldn't say nobody, but a complaint from one of my buddies who was a Czech airman. He could tell they start studying the night before and he would tell them, you know, you guys are working for a year until I come around to give you your 135 checkride. And it's obvious to me you're not looking at the POH, because you should know this POH better. You have 12 hours of shipped. You have a whole year that you could, one night a week, you could open up that POH and spend 15, 20 minutes going through the thing, different sections of it to keep, keep these things fresh. So that would be, that would be my answer would be repetition. Having a copy of what you. A copy for the aircraft you're flying. Review it often and go to hogshelicopterground.com and sign up for a course and go through the R22 or R44 videos for either aircraft to help learn the PoH.

Okay, we'll do three more questions and then roll into our next video. So this question comes in from that guy in the sky and they want to know if you have your students check the rear cowling before all flights.

The rear cowling specifically? Well, we teach that last minute walk around, right? This is something we should all be doing. Whether you're a student, a private training environment, commercial environment, we do all the. Let me back up. Here's one thing that what I have people do when you're pre flighting, even if it's inside, if you open up a door before you walk away, you close it. The one thing that drives me crazy is when somebody's pre flighting and they got all the doors open and they're just walking around and going to the bathroom and doing this. No, it's not how it's done. I was lucky that when I first started flying the R22 and my instructor's like, hey, moving forward here, as you're learning, here's something I want you to do. I want you to never walk away from the helicopter with an open panel. And when you open a panel, do what you got to do and then lock that latch that panel back in. Even if you're going to walk over here and go to the bathroom, or you're going to walk over there and pick a paper towel up, latch that panel, walk away, do what you got to do, come back and unlatch it. So number one, that's what I teach students. Keep the damn doors closed, keep the latches closed, open it up, latch it back up. Then when we push the aircraft outside, we do a walk around, right? You got to have that minimum one time walk around before climbing in. And that one time walk around is checking your latches. Are all the latches back facets are the gas caps on anything leaking out of the helicopter? You know, we did that in EMS that was required. You must do a walk around every single flight, even Though you've pre flighted the last thing you do before you fly and climb in once the aircraft's moved out, ready to go. Last minute walk around in an ems, they required us to touch every panel. And I think that's a good, that's a good method that I probably should have students doing is actually physically go around and touch. Right. Touch each panel. That way, you know, specifically everything is checked. So I am big on checking cowlings, checking latches, the last minute walk around. And I could say that because I have missed it. You know, I've done it. I took off once in an instrument and a control controlled environment and the tower gave me a call and they're like, hey, helicopter two and three Bravo. Lina, you've got a, you've got an engine. Cowling is flopping in the wind.

Oh, damn it.

Right.

Went back land, got out and secured it. So have I ever made a mistake and forgot one? Sure I have. We've all done it. And in EMS they taught us about an accident where a cowling and I don't was a BK or an ec. One of the cowlings came up. Cowling wasn't latched. Cowling came up and apparently came loose and got into the rotor blades. And I believe that was actually a fatal accident that came from that event. So they stressed a lot in EMS that walk around touching every panel. And I'm big on keeping panels closed and latched up. Firm believer in that.

This next one is from Mark. If a flight school is not teaching the Vachard recovery method, can a student or new pilot book time with you to learn the method?

You guys can, can come here and you can certainly come here and do that. Hauser likes it and Hauser is more versed in it than I am. So I'd probably send you out with Hauser. I like, I'm going to be transparent here. Right. I like the good old standard move and get air speed and fly out of it. However, I understand why the Richard method.

Is.

A great method, especially if you're at low level. I've only met messed around with a little bit, specifically with Hauser and I've done it with a few students. But I just, in general, I kind of stick with the good old fly out of it. But we'll certainly do that with you. Absolutely. And you know, I should go out and actually practice a little more and get a little more used to it myself. But we'll absolutely do the Bouchard with you. Absolutely.

Have you ever experienced vortex ring state.

Sailing with power I have one time it happened to me for real. Okay? So of course, as an instructor, you go out with students all the time and you practice this. So you go out, you get to 2,000ft and get the wind, maybe like a crosswind or something, and you'll actually put the aircraft into selling the power in a training environment. Let it start to happen. Get the vibration, feel the descent, feel the aircraft shutter, get it to safe 500ft per minute or higher, a good descent rate, fly out of it. I had it happen to me one time. And the good news is, I was thinking about it. We went up. I was flying a Jet Ranger and we were doing a news call. And I talk about flying the Jet Ranger a lot because I learned a lot flying one in the hot summertime and flying news reporting. So one evening we went up and the news asked us to stay up longer than normal. We Normally went with 50 gallons of fuel because the Jet Ranger would burn 25 an hour. So if we had 50 gallons, we knew we could fly for a full hour and have another hour of fuel. And usually a news call, you're up for hour or less. On this particular night, it was a hot summer night, humid, really humid. We took on an extra passenger because we had the pilot, the camera operator in the back. And then if we had a student there, we would let the student ride along and get to fly the Jet Ranger. So I take on a student, and they said, we want you to stay up and go live at 6pm so can you make sure you take extra fuel with you because we want you to stay up longer than normal. And so we said, sure. So I added extra fuel, more than we would carry. So we went out knowing it was hot, knowing it was heavy. And here's what always happens, whether it's a photo flight or a news flight, you're circling the event that they want you to film, and you come around and the news station, you know, you're giving them a live feed. So about the time they go, ooh, hey, stop right there. Slow down, stop. That's the shot we want. Well, it never fails that the shot they want, the freaking wind is off your tail. It never freaking fails, right? So sometimes you put yourself in an environment where you're like, okay. Most time you just tell people no, right? Depending on if it's how much of a tailwind you have, majority of time you just say, I can't do that. I'm going to have to give you a different shot. But for whatever reason, I decided to do this and try to do this hover out of ground effect with at least a partial tailwind. And I even pre warned them, said, okay, this is going to, this could get us in the ceiling of power. So let's just be ready. Sure enough, it happened. And it's. What's funny is when it happens to you for real, not in where you're putting it into it for a training thing. When, when it happens to you, when it really happens, you do feel that sluggishness in the controls. It happens pretty quick. It's a really, really weird feeling. And so I just had plenty of altitude, so I just moved the cyclic forward, flew out of it and away we went. So I did one time where it wasn't a training, where I was doing it on purpose that it happened to me. And again, luckily we had enough altitude and I just flew away. But I was conscious of it, right? And I was like, okay, we know this is going to be on the edge here in a little bit. We're going to play a video that we have that has 6.5 million views on it. We're gonna play that a little bit. And that's Jed. And I'll tell you more story when we get, get closer to that video. I did his training years ago. It's a great story. And I'll tell you that story in a bit about how a kid started out and came to see me just fresh out of high school and now he flies a tree saw. But he took me up in the tree saw helicopter and we're up there by the power lines and I'm like, man, I go, do you think about selling with power? And he's like, every day, all day, dude. He goes, I'm. It's on my mind all day, every day, right? Like we, yes, we are always thinking about it because of all these crazy situations. They put themselves flying low in all kinds of different weird positions. All right, you have it down in your head what the angle looks like. If you've got it set in the aircraft where you know and you use 300 AGL, you can go to any airport in the world and fly a normal in a steep or shallow and you can do it consecutively. Are you struggling setting up approaches and flying your approaches between normal, steep and shallow? From beginner to commercial cfi getting ready for a checkride. A lot of people struggle with setting up their approaches and understanding sight picture. And you wouldn't think that's the case, but I'm bringing this to you. After 16 checkrides, I've done in the last year with people coming from around the country for commercial and cfi. And you'd be surprised the people that show up and still go, you know, I'm still struggling with how to set up an approach and what's really a normal or a steep. And that's not the fault of people, that's the fault of the instructors, not helping them come up with a standardization like figure out what is an approach and what does it look like. So we're going to use the standard old handy dandy plotter that many of you probably don't even own. But here's what we did, okay, so what I did, we got some lightly drawn lines on here. This is your ground level and we had a line here. So we could use this and we could make our 5 degree, our 10 degree and our 15 degree and draw these out so that you can see them. So let's talk about that first simple little tool to actually figure 5 degrees, 10 degrees, 15 degrees. Okay? So that's how we know this is pretty darn close to what we're talking about on 5, 10, or 15. So if you're struggling with approaches, you need to nail the normal first. Okay, so I'm going to repeat this over and over. Shallow is 5, normal is 10, and a steep is 15. If you nail the normal first, then you know, you can judge later how to do a shallow and how to do a steep. And we've got another diagram to show you in the cockpit. And we're going to talk about a little bit more down here on the bottom of the page. So checkride question, private commercial examiner can ask you, what's 5 or what's a normal? It's 10, what's a shallow? It's 5, what's a steep? 15. So if you look at this, a person can go visualize this, right? You have your helicopter up here. Here's where you are, are, here's where you're going to end up. This is a Runway. Here's the ground. Just take an overview and look at that. You can sit in the aircraft or be flying an approach in, and you can kind of judge, right? Like, let's go to the extreme. There's people out here being taught, like, they'll come here from wherever and I'll go show me a steep approach and they'll come in here like 45 degrees. And I use the plotter again to draw this. That's 45 degrees. There are people that are legitimately coming here and somebody has taught them to Fly a steep approach at 45 degrees. If somebody is teaching you that, I'm going to be nice. You've been taught wrong. If there's some reason that you got to try to get in a spot at 45 degrees, you're coming in way too damn steep. Okay, Helicopter Flying Handbook. This is standard request training in the OS. Shallow fi, normal 10, steep 15. Know those numbers and again you can visualize this, right? What is 5, what is 10, what is 15? Learn the normal first. Then you can build on what's it look like for shallow, what's it look like for steep? So textbook 300 AGL across the board. Student pilot, professional pilot. This is what we do. Set it up at 300 AGL before you intercept your approach angle. So imagine you're out here tooling along. You've come around downwind base and you're on final. You're established at 300, you got a nice setup. 0a descent, you're in trim speeds there, you got everything you want. Let's talk about a normal first. We have a spot right here hitting that green line for your normal. So you're coming along at 300 AGL, you're going to intercept your normal approach of 10 degrees and fly it down. And in a minute we're going to go to an interior drawing and expand more on this. So it wants you to know what a normal looks like. And you get that. You feel good about it, your instructors agreed with you, or you really believe you're on a 10 degree. You fly that down, look for a landmark on the ground. A lot of times maybe there's a, a farmhouse, maybe there's a river, maybe there's a fence. If this is for like your traffic pattern you're learning at the airport where your practions of stuff all the time time. Once you establish 10 degrees for normal, look for a landmark down there. And then you know, if I'm at 300 AGL, I'm over that tree line down there. I am set to follow that angle all the way down. So what you're going to do for a shallow approach is you're going to still be at 300 AGL, but you're going to start a little sooner and fly that 5 degree down. If you're going to fly a steep approach in again your 300 AGL coming along, good setup, everything nice and neat. When you intercept that 15 degree angle, then you start flying that down to your touchdown spot. So learn the normal first. Understand fully because everything we do starts with a normal takeoff On a normal landing, once you have that established and you know what that looks like, then you can build on that to go. Okay, I know I'm going to enter a little sooner for a shallow. I'm going to enter a little bit later to start that steep. But I'm still going to enter at 300 AGL. So here we go. And you're going to love our images. I drew them, so you can't. Don't blame Lindsey. So here's we're going to use the R44 for an example, setting up the sight picture in the aircraft. Once you've established what we just talked about, let's actually go back for a second. When you kind of figure out what your 10 degree is and you know where it's at at 300 AGL, then you're going to be able to establish where is the numbers. This is going to be your landing spot, the numbers 2, 7 on the Runway. Okay, so for this example, we're going to use 2.7. So depending on the aircraft you're in and the setup, this can be different for whoever you are anywhere in the world. In any given aircraft, we're going to use this pretty yellow R44. And what worked out for one person makes this pretty easy to explain. Now, it might not work for the next person who's taller, shorter, but the person that this worked out for in the R44, when they were at 300 AGL on a 10 degree angle to fly into the numbers 2, 7. The numbers 2, 7 are parallel with right where the strings attach on the windshield. So that's normal, normal 5 degrees. So when you're coming along, when you see the numbers right there on the down on the Runway, even with where those strings attach, boom. You're now on a normal approach. Remember, collective controls the angle, cyclic controls the speed. So you want to keep that same angle all the way down to your numbers. So in turn, think about this. You're coming in, if you're going to fly a steep, you're going to want it to the number. You're going to want the numbers to be about right here, maybe where the strings go to when they're moving out to the side. This far down the numbers two, seven, about there would be your steep approach angle. So you're going to enter that a little bit later. Here's your normal. As you get, you keep saying it's your 300 AGL, you fly a little farther, boom. There you're at your steep. Now you fly that down and then same Thing as you're approaching the Runway at your 300 AGL, when the numbers are lined up with, you know, an equidistant space above where the compass attaches. Say I'm going just above where the compass attaches for my shallow approach. You're going to see the numbers out here, something that looks like that. So again, this could be different for any person. An instrument I used to have, it worked with the compass. Where the center of the compass was a normal, the bottom of the compass was a steep, and the top of the compass was a shallow. So you got to go out there and figure out for your aircraft the way you sit in it and figure out your surroundings. So let's just, you know, it seems pretty basic. And I've been doing videos now for over 12 years and I've taught this a lot, but it's always in the helicopter talking, talking, telling you, trying to show you in an aircraft. And we spent half a day trying to figure out how we could do this and just make this like the coolest thing ever. And I thought, you know what, let's just draw it. We're not going for the most expert drawing everywhere, but this is what you need to know. If you're struggling with approaches, sit down and think about it. Again, I'm going to recap. A normal is 10, a shallow is 5, as steep is 15. Once you establish that normal, there's this thing in aviation we call common sense. Like, think about it and what makes sense, right? You know, an airplane flies a 3 degree a lot of times, right for their approaches. So they're clear down here. 10 for normal, 5 degrees for shallow, 15 for steep. If you're coming in at 45, you've been taught to come in way too damn steep. Don't do that. Not smart, stupid, Actually on the verge of selling with power. So then remember, and here's the part that people don't get. They try to come around and roll out on final. Right on, right on an approach setting. Well, then it means you're changing every time you come out on bass to final. If you're trying to roll out right on your approach angle, how hard is that to change that base and final? Every time that you roll out here for a shallow, or you roll out here for a normal, or you roll out here for a steep. That's just. Why work that hard? Why work so hard to do that? Start all approaches at 300 AGL, figure out the normal, focus on that, learn that normal, then you can adjust. I started, I'm still using 300 AGL, but I'm entering a little sooner. The full. Fly that 5 degrees down or I'm waiting a little later to fly down that 15. And let's flip over here one more time. I'm telling you, if you're struggling, this is how you do it. So again, for this example, we're in an R44. We're at 300 AGL, trying to pick our angle down to the Runway. Let's use this, for example. You see 2.7. It's coming, it's coming, it's coming. When it gets to about there, there's your south shallow. Start flying that angle down. Let's repeat for normal. Here comes your numbers. They're down the Runway. You're watching them. You're watching them. Your 300 AGL, they get about right there. There's your normal. Follow that angle all the way down. Same thing for steep 300 AGL. Good setup every time. Everything the same. Altitude, the same airspeed, the same in trim, RPM fixed. Have everything fixed. Because a nice approach is a good setup. So you just keep waiting, and you wait and you wait. And when that number gets to about there, there's your steep. So find in your aircraft in this example, it's where the strings attach. Maybe it's the compass, maybe it's the center, the top and the bottom. Whatever you can use. Hell, there's people that use a bug on the windshield or a chip on the windshield. I've seen people. I'll look for a marker. I don't see anything close. I've seen people actually take a marker and mark on the window glass. I don't recommend you do that unless you're the people that own the aircraft you're using. If they allow it, Hell, go out there and put an eraser mark once you've kind of got that sight picture down so that you can go out and consistently fly these approaches. Know 300 AGL is where you should be starting. If you can find a landmark to. To go along with that. Once you nail down that sight picture, you can fly these consistently at any airport anywhere around the world. Here's the other thing. Somebody goes, well, I. They always want to go to the airport where they're getting ready to take their check ride. I'm like, you know what? You're taking a rating for a minimum private pilot or commercial or cfi. You should know how to go to any airport in the world and fly one of these approaches. You shouldn't have to go practice at your checkride airport. If you have it down in your head what the angle looks like, if you've got it set in the aircraft where you know and you use 300 AGL, you can go to any airport in the world and fly a normal in a steep or a shallow, and you can do it consecutively. So leave us some feedback below. We'll probably do this again and maybe a different form or fashion. But I thought, you know what? Let's do down and dirty. And for anybody struggling because we just had a Hogs member today that said, man, I'm struggling with the steep. I just can't figure out how it looks. And I go, you know what? Lately we've had so many people say this that, man, I'm struggling with my approaches. I'm struggling with setting them out. My camera girl's over there yawning. I'm so boring. All right, better wrap it up since she's falling asleep over there, like.

And subscribe.

Peace out. Like, subscribe. Nobody cares. Don't subscribe.

Don't.

Like, don't, don't comment. Nah, 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 we just had Chinese, and my fortune cookie says, this year, let go of fear and embrace courage in all aspects of your life. There I go. Here I keep these. First book I ever wrote. I used these to put these in each chapter. I picked out of a pile of these that I've kept. Put those in my book. First book ever that we're not giving away today. We could do any left. We do have some left, don't we?

I have no idea.

All right, let's do that. We'll give this. We'll give this one. So this was the first book I ever did. What is it? How old is it? 2,000. And I don't see the date. I don't remember. It's gotta be 10 years old. We'll give this away. Helicopter Checkride. This was my first book. It's called Helicopter Checkride, but it's just a lot of helicopter stuff. First paragraph or first chapter? About a little bit about me and how I got started. And then just stuff that I found interesting about learning to fly and taking tests and a lot of different things. So let's throw this in there just for difference, something different. Sure. So what's your question? Well, is there any questions that came in fresh? No. All right, well, somebody ask a question. Simple. Something we haven't answered today a flight or ground training question. And we'll send you this copy of the book. And I will talk about our cell again if you people are coming and going in chat. And we appreciate all the people. We've got over 200 people in and out today. That's incredible. That's the best live we've had in a long time. Oh, yeah. So do me a favor. If you haven't subscribed to the channel, please do. Trying to get to 50,000 subscribers. We've got over 600 that added themselves in the last 30 days. And I really appreciate that. We're about 40. About that. 48,000, I think. 46, 47, something like that. And I want to get to 50,000 subscribers. Doesn't mean anything. I don't get any money. I get nothing. Not even a kiss my ass from YouTube, nothing. I just want to hit 50,000 because it sounds cool. Been my goal for a while. What video are we going to do next, Lindsay?

Say that again.

Which.

What's our next video?

Our next video is a series of short videos of your first videos.

So the girls wanted me to roll these next two videos. I would have preferred not to, but. So disclaimer. The first one is the first video I ever made in my life for helicopter training. It's very short. It's about 30 seconds. And I had a borrowed video camera. I was living in a trailer. I literally legitimately owned a helicopter, was flying ems and I was broke because the helicopter was stealing all my EMS money, blah, blah, blah. So that's the first one. And then the second one is a uncut video that was supposed to never go live that I mentioned earlier. It has some foul language at the beginning of it. That was just me goofing around the hangar getting ready to shoot the first sales video ever for hogs. Or one of the first site wasn't even live yet and accidentally public got clicked on this video. It was only there for storage and we were supposed to edit out the very beginning and somehow it got released and some dude saw it on YouTube. But even though the beginning was a horrible beginning when it was to never be seen by the public, somebody emailed me right away, Kenny, Kenny, where's the button on your website to buy this? Ground school. I can't find it. The button wasn't live because this video was supposed to never go out. So any other questions pop up since we mentioned that?

Well, I have one. Okay, two. And then we are gonna go back up and chat and find some more so this first one comes from Copter Bob asking how much you weigh. For weight and balance purposes only, of course.

How much do I weigh? Do we know you, Copter Bob? I think we do. I don't think it's any of your business what I weigh.

Well, technically he was the first one for this giveaway to ask a question.

Yeah, yeah. Doesn't mean he gets to know my weight.

Does he get the book? If you don't answer his question. If you don't answer the question question, do they get the book or should I move on and give the book away to.

He can have the book if he was legitimately. I said. He said for weight and balance purpose.

Is that what he said?

Yeah, yeah, snidey, snidey comment there. I mean, do you really want to know?

He's estimating that you probably weigh about 155 pounds. But he doesn't need the book.

Wow, 155. Ah dang, I wish I weighed 155. I haven't weighed 155 since probably about 8th grade or 6th grade. No, I'm well over 200 pounds. Well over 200. Enough that most people I can't fly with in the R22, I'll put it that way. You gotta be pretty light in order for me able to climb in the R22 with you. That's why Hauser's in charge of flying the R22. I'll take the R44. Hauser is definitely a little lighter than me. All right, what's next?

This next one comes from Barry, who technically then would win the book. He is asking what are the rules for airports with no tower?

What are the rules for airports with no tower? Well, are you asking about south self announced procedures on the radio as the only thing that I can think of right the top of the bat. As far as no control tower. You use self announced procedures on the radio, meaning you state when you're leaving the hangar, when you're taking the Runway, a lot of people call departure, they can call crosswind downwind final. But as far as uncontrolled airports, you can basically go out there and as long as you're doing everything legally with within, you know, the normal regs that we fly under, you can pretty much go out and you know, do whatever you need to do. Not sure what else he might be really looking for but self announced procedures and go out and fly the aircraft the way it's intended to be flown. You know, be courteous to others, make radio Calls. That's all I can think of.

Up in chat. We have a couple of questions about, about doors on helicopters. So this first one is coming from mom shepherd and they want to know, do you think it's safe or dangerous flying with helicopter doors off?

Oh, great question. I love doors off. And if you've seen any of our videos in the summertime, doors are off. Okay? So there are special precautions to take and we've been covering that this week. And we've covered it in our ground school. We've talked about this many times. Robinsons, for example, they have a safety notice if you're going to, they say do not remove the left door, but they also give you a number or never exceed speed for all the doors off. So you can certainly go fly with doors off if you want to. The trick is being careful to make sure that you don't have anything inside the helicopter that's going to fly out the window. Because something flies out the window, it could go into the tail rotor, destroy the tail rotor and cause a fatal accident. And that's why Robinson has a safety notice out to not remove the left door. So what we do sometimes, let's say in the spring where it's starting to warm up, but it's not hot, but it's hot when the sun's beating you down, when you're doing your startup and shutdown, we'll take off the right hand door. So that way if any anything would fly out, it would be less likely to go in to the tail rotor. So we take off the right, leave the left door on. But there's nothing wrong with taking them off. And I think it's totally safe. That little plexiglass door isn't going to really do much for you if you have an accident. But it's about good cockpit management and making sure there is nothing inside that aircraft that can fly out the window. So yes, I think it's safe as long as you're using precautions to make sure there's no loose items in the aircraft. And even just the fact of stuff could be flying around in the cockpit, even maybe not go out the window, but fly around, get stuck in a control. There's lots of reasons why the cockpit needs to be really clean, nice, neat, organized, everything locked down, nothing that can fly out or move around.

That answers the question from that guy in the sky. And then I have another one from Red Fluffle, Red Devil Fly when you exceed the weight and balance with gas of gas. Okay, do you drain or burn out.

And hover that is another great question. If you overloaded the helicopter. Great question. You should either offload fuel, offload passengers, and you could sit on the ground and run to burn fuel off. And I can tell you where that happened in the commercial environment. Fly an ems. Let's say we get a call and we do a weight and balance for every single call and they give you an estimated patient weight before you take off. So they might say the patient's 200. Then you get there and you land and the medical team comes over and goes, oh, hey, by the way, they said 200. Now this person's like 350. And you're like, okay, let me do the redo the weight and balance. Oh, we have too much fuel. We could sit there and burn off fuel or we could offload something on the aircraft. And they actually had a background basket of like their least important pieces of equipment that was configured ahead of time in the weight and balance that if we wanted to remove that one basket to make the aircraft lighter. So if you had too much weight, either drain it, you could sit and burn it off, you could unload passengers to make up to get you back under the weight and balance. But yeah, if you were over on fuel, you would not want to fly because that would be legal and you would just have to again, offload fuel or offload people and get it back under the legal weight. And on that note, will a helicopter fly overweight? Absolutely. And what's the problem? It might fly overweight just fine. You may not even notice it. But if it's overweight, not only are you putting stress on the aircraft that's undue and unneeded, that could cause a failure later.

It's also.

You may not be able to handle emergency. The helicopter is designed to handle the auto rotations and all the different things that we do. It's designed to do that within the weight limits. So if you were overweight, you could fly it. Possibly. But you may not be able to handle emergency successfully.

Okay, it looks like we have one more question and we can go ahead and roll on to the next videos if you're down. All right, but have you ever had an engine oil light come on?

I have had engine oil pressure light come on in a NSTROM turbine model.

And.

It was an aircraft that I had never flown before. I was picking it up in Chicago, bringing it back to Indiana. It's a fun story because Jed's involved. The video of Jed, the kid I'm going to talk about a little bit, who I trained from out of high school. Now he's a tree saw pilot. Jed was with me, and I had checked the PoH to make sure it was behind the seat. And we took off and we're over Chicago, you know, urban area, nowhere to really land. And engine oil pressure light comes on. So I looked down to the oil temperature. It was okay. Oil pressure was okay. So I didn't say a word. Jed saw it, I reached out, I hand him the poh. He opened it, and we verified what I thought was the proper procedure. And the proper procedure was as long as your oil pressure and temperature were okay, proceed to the next airport. So went to the next airport, landed, checked the fluids, looked underneath the helicopter, checked everything out, Looked fine. Called the mechanic, hey, oil pressure light come on. He's like, did you check the oil or the oil tank? Yep, it's got oil. How was your temperatures and pressure? They were good. He goes, all right, bring it on home. He goes, those aircraft are known for that. That particular switch tripping often. So since there's no other indications of anything wrong, go ahead and fly it home. So, yes, one time I had an oil pressure light in a turbine aircraft that came on, and that's how we handled it. And no problem. So the point is, don't wreck the helicopter over a light. Never, never do it, you know, oh, my God, the lights on. And do an auto. Don't do that. Not good.

Sounds good.

Unless auto is the procedure for whatever light that comes on. But most generally, don't auto over a warning light unless it's engine out.

Sounds good. Are we giving away the Corvette or wrangler today?

The what or the what?

The. Your wrangler or the Corvette?

I mean, negative. Nope. Okay, when we get big and famous, maybe.

Okay, last question and then we'll roll in. This is tacked on from that guy in the sky asking if you've ever had your engine oil light come on. But he wants to know what light would come on that would require you to land immediately.

Land immediately. Well, it depends on what aircraft you're flying, right? There's not many immediately. I could tell you which one. Let's say, okay, I got one. In the instrument, you have a main rotor gearbox chip light. And what I liked about the instrument had a main rotor gearbox temperature gauge. And that was nice, because if that main rotor or main rotor gearbox chip light come on, you could look down at the gearbox temperature. If the gearbox temperature was like, higher than it should be, that for me would be a land immediately gearbox. Because obviously if your gearbox goes you could, it could be completely over. There could be nothing you could do if that thing locked up. Right. So that would be one, would be if I was an impending gearbox failure. And I remember in ems, one of the aircraft we flew land immediately was over a. A light for the gearbox. So yeah, that would be one because. Or if I. Same thing with oil pressure, oil temperature. If one of those was passed pegged, I'd land immediately for sure. Those would be the main ones. Oil pressure, oil temperature, main rotor gearbox. Yeah.

Low fuel light.

Low fuel light, depending on the aircraft. Yeah, low fuel lights, get it on the ground pretty darn quickly. I mean it land immediately means you got to land even in like trees. Right. A lot depends on how someone's doing defines land immediately if I have to go into a set of trees, but I can go another 30 seconds to land on an open field. I'm going to go to the open field. And again, depending on what it was, but something like a gearbox, you might be forced to land in the trees. So what was the question? Did I cover it?

It was, it was, yeah, that was the question.

Yeah. It just depends, right? What aircraft are you flying and what if exactly is going on? If you're worried about the gearbox, you might have to settle in the trees.

All right, so we'll roll into your first two videos.

So there's two videos. Remember the girls talked me into playing these. It would not be my first choice, but it is my first video I ever made. Go ahead. My latest blog post is I own a helicopter and I live in a trailer. And it's just, it's a point of what we go through to live out our dream and our love for helicopters. And what I'm really getting at is some of the hardships that you're going to endure along the way, particularly going through the training and getting your first start is kind of where I'm really going. So stop by our new blog@fwhihelicopters.com and and check it out and let's talk about it. Powers on 1, 2, 3. Testing the mic, see how it sounds. Terry's walking along, moving the camera, blah blah blah. I'm trying to get pumped up and record cuz I'm really frustrated and I really don't want to do this but I need to cuz I got to cuz I'm a broke, Got shitloads and shitloads to do. I worked my ass off for nothing. I'm broke as fucking hell. I'm behind on every fucking payment there Is the airport manager. Just fucking paid my rent so I wouldn't get kicked out. And I gotta go and screw it up with my girlfriend too who's back home because I'm a jackass. Yeah. All right. Gonna do my little thing. Get pumped up, get excited. Get pumped up, get excited. Get pumped up, get excited. Get pumped up, get excited. How about if I even go back and just kind of walk around the back of the aircraft. Okay, let's do this.

Where's Kenneth?

What?

We're live.

Oh, I thought you was playing the full video.

I did, I'm sorry. We're live. We're back. Have fun looking at her empty screen.

All right.

No, I thought you were playing the full. Full cells video.

It went by very quickly.

Yeah, but the video I thought it was. Was like a 10 minute video. It was the first sales video, the first announce of the product.

Oh, sorry. The one that I found was not that long.

All right, well then I guess let's cue it. We'll queue up, we'll do Jed's next. The fun part about Jed was he walked in with his parents just as he was graduating high school, basically and. Or just after not long getting out of school school. And he's like, yeah, I want to learn to fly helicopters. And so he started taking lessons with me in Cleveland and I think helped him get through his private. And then he came out to work on his commercial with me. I'd come back to Indiana and I'd had. It was after my helicopter accident and I was waiting to get my medical back, but I could still flip fly because he was pic. So he came up and I helped him work on his commercial. And Jed would drive over and like typical person getting through their ratings, he. Sometimes he stayed at my house on the couch. Sometimes he slept in the back of his truck at the airport. Other times he would sleep inside the airport in the pilot's lounge on the couch. Because he was typical person working through their ratings, struggling with the money. Didn't have money for really for hotels. All his money was going to flight training. So that's where he started. And I didn't see him for a while. And he called me one day and he was like, dude, I'm flying a saw, a tree saw. And I'm going, a tree saw? What the hell is a tree saw? And he explained to me how these helicopters have a series of saw blades on this contraption that hangs underneath the helicopter. And when he told me about it, I thought, what, this? I'd never seen that. I Thought was crazy. So then he, at some point he was flying to Indiana and he called me and he goes, dude, I'm down here in southern Indiana flying and trimming trees, you should come down here. And so I drove down there and took a video camera with me and made the video that we're getting ready to roll. And so Jed is just another one of those stories, you know, somebody that started from, from scratch and started out early and paid his dues and did what he had to to get his hours and get his ratings and got aggressive on getting out there. And when he for the tree saw job, I remember he was low time pilot. But they said if you come out and you, you know, run the line truck and be a service guy for a little while and prove to us how bad you want it and then eventually we'll move you into the helicopter and we'll train you and, and make you a tree saw pilot. So he did, he went to work for him at the low level, worked his way up to the pilot position and you know, now the kids living the dream and it's a super, super fun success story. So go ahead and roll that now, Lindsay. Well, I'm Kenny Keller, the creator of Helicopter online ground school and author of the book Helicopter Checkride. I had the privilege to go see one of my former students that started out with me over 10 years ago as a new kid right out of high school and now he's a helicopter tree saw pilot. I spent two days watching him and his partner work the operation, the helicopter tree sawing and it was absolutely amazing. These guys work awesome together as a team. They work a crazy schedule. 28 days on, 28 days off. They work really hard while they're away from their families and then they get a break and get to go home for 28 days. This is an absolute amazing helicopter pilot job. I've been in and around helicopters for 20 years and I was completely and entirely amazed by this operation. The tree saw hangs below the helicopter from aluminum tube and the tube basically just is a carry mount for the saw. The saw itself has a gas motor that drives the saws with a belt. The pilot operates the saw from inside the helicopter. He could start the unit, get the blade spinning and get them up to rpm. And he can also turn the saw in relation to the helicopter depending on how he's cutting. The skill to fly this helicopter and manage the saw and stay safe and clear of the power lines, keep track of everything going on on the ground, make sure that you're not going to cause any damage to persons or property on the ground. It's just simply an amazing feat. If you enjoy this video, please give us a like and a share and leave your comments down below. Sam, Wasn't that freaking cool? Those things are just. I remember being there and seeing that and I was in freaking amazement. I actually have been to visit him twice doing that. I was wrong the first time. I filmed that in Ohio and then he ended up in Indiana. I went down there and spent a couple days with him too. I have a whole series of videos actually that I did on my second trip where I broke the videos down. And we do a lot of behind the scenes stuff that's even in a playlist. Well, to maybe look that up before we go, let you know in case you want to learn some more about that. I did like 10 or 12 videos on the whole topic and again, I did a lot of behind the scenes stuff with them. Yeah, we should, we should play some of those. I want to talk about what's going on in the world. I brought it up yesterday. I want to know in the chat, what do you think? Like starts out in New Jersey. Now there's stuff all over the place. And you know, I always enjoy a good conspiracy regardless, right? I don't care what it is because I figure if there's 100 conspiracies out there, at least a few of those conspiracies got to be true, right? Or at least some of the conspiracy, some of it's based on truth. I think we got, of course, airplanes, helicopters, commercial drones. We have all the stuff that's out there that's always been there. And because more people are looking up, more stuff gets reported. I think that's one thing. I think that is the. Some of them are ours. I think some of the things we're seeing out there are things that our government knows about. And do I think they're lying to us? Of course that. I think they're always lying to us. Do I think they know what a lot of it is? I think that, yes, that they do to an extent. Now I watched a special last night. I was up late watching this other one and I don't know if any of you are familiar with this Dr. Greer, but I know he's a lot into the alien thing and I never really watch much of his stuff, but I watched Interesting thing last night or early this morning, he was talking about how there's, you know, black op groups, you know, that operate outside the government, that even the government doesn't know they exist and they're funded by the, you know, whoever you want to say, the elite and that even the government doesn't know about some of the stuff that's actually out there and went into the whole thing theory of they're preparing us for, you know, they're trying to oh spread disinformation and they want to turn it into even though it may, most of it's probably not alien, it's man made but they want you to, they're going to make up a fake alien attack and all the conspiracies go flipping crazy. And I listened to all of it, right and some of it seems pretty outlandish but I'd love to know what you people think which there's only about 20 people in here at a time but if you watch this video later, type in chat or type in the comments down below. If you see us later, what do you think's going on? I'd love to know what you know most generally people following us or attending these events are aviation related people, right? So you know when you look at some of these things in the sky, if it's got a red and green, you know, typical navigation light then it's probably some, either a civilian or commercial aircraft of some kind. But then there's a lot of other oddball stuff you see. But then other thing I heard and I would believe this because of what's going on, a lot of people are throwing up stuff that was seen in the sky a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, two years ago. So how many of the videos and stuff that you that pop up are stuff that didn't happen in the last month happened two years ago, Right. How much of that stuff's getting uploaded? How much of it is AI? I'm sure there's a lot of people, people using AI to create a lot of this Weird. So I don't have any answers but I surely am intrigued.

Have you heard about AI being a cause of being the high cause of pollution now and that by 2030 an estimated a hundred thousand people are going to die every year from pollution?

I haven't heard that. What do they say is how AI is causing pollution?

It has everything to do with database centers where servers for AI are powered and that the amount of fossil fuels used to to keep those data servers.

On.

It has an effect on the air quality and surrounding areas of where they're located. Would see the highest reported like cases.

I could see that. I did. I watch a lot of stuff, right. I've been Watching other people's podcasts and I like watching stuff from legitimate, like, I mean, I'll watch anything, right? And I'll watch, watch just Joe Blow making a pick, you know, video home in his garage. Right. But I've also watched some very credible people, some super credible podcasts and scientists and they did talk about how, yes, AI is consuming a lot of power and as that increases it's going to require more power. And we already know that our, you know, power grids probably kind of weird, weak. I, I think anybody could go along with that and believe that. So could there be. Yeah, I could see where that could be a possibility. You know, that makes, that makes some sense. And again, I don't believe in everything I hear, but I enjoy listening. Right. And try to think of something actually feasible or not. You know, do I think a lot of us made just to scare the hell out of us? I do believe that. I think there's a lot of stuff that goes on that's just purposely trying to scare us and. Because sure, why wouldn't the powers that be want to keep us scared? Right? But I think we go on and live our lives every day and do what we want to do and not worry about it. Right. Okay. Any comments?

Yes, that guy in the sky does not believe in aliens.

Hey, I don't discount it. I mean, I'm a, I'm a. Here's what's funny about it, right? Like, because I meant I'm into the topic. Like, do I believe that there could be another civilization in this universe? Absolutely. I think could be. Do I think they've ever visited? Maybe, maybe they have never. Maybe the trip is too far. Maybe there's another theory that some of the stuff we're seeing is ancient civilization, that they were always here from the first place. So they're not aliens. It's the ancient technology that's been here all along. That's another theory that I just recently heard. And I thought, well, you know, it's a, it's, you know, a million year old society, that this is what's left, who knows? But I like the topic and I'm interested in. But for a guy who was like, especially throughout the whole summer, I'm on the boat and I'm, and I'm waiting to see something interesting in the sky, right? Like I've seen Starlink. I know what that looks like. I've seen it three, three or four times now. That's incredible. I know when I see the space station go over. We did mention yesterday we're going to search for some pictures. We got some pictures of something strange crap out here during the day last this past summer that we really tried identifying and couldn't. We. We ruled out ourselves by zooming in. We ruled out brain birds, planes, drones. We saw some weird stuff that don't know what it was. And then on one other time it's been. God, 12 years ago. I saw some lights once in down North Carolina, but it was just three lights that popped up in the sky. Could have been aircraft, but it was a different kind of light that I'd never seen before. And they were spaced kind of weird and the color was kind of different. And then I've seen since seen something stuff that's like uploaded other parts of the country that I'm like that looks like the lights I saw that night. Very, very strange.

But and, and Hauser. Oh yeah, recently saw something strange just then.

See that would have been just kind of, that's recent past kind of before the whole New Jersey thing kind of started kicking up. We'll say maybe October. I think it was around October. I think it was October.

And I was thinking September. I thought it was 10. Still pretty warm.

September, October, you know, Hauser, we had showed him like the pictures we had of these things in the sky that we. Because we took like 5,000 pictures this summer. So we were taking photos like crazy and we were just going through photos and also we're like what the hell is that in that photo? We started zooming in and so we were trying to figure that out. And I was showing it to Hauser and most of it he was like, I don't know, I don't know. But he. There was one or two that he went. You know, I'm not really into the whole, you know, UFO kind of thing, but those. That's really strange. I'll give you that one. And then within a couple days they were going for a night flight and we went over here to Texas Roadhouse to get some food. And Houser's a straight shooter, ex cop, you know, a lot of fun, good guy. And we left Texas Roadhouse. He came here to do a night flight with one of our members. And I was heading to the grocery store and I remember going by the airport and looking over and going, I should have went over and watched him take off. But I'm like, I need to go to the grocery store. I'm just going to do that and go home. And I'm in the grocery store looking for whatever. I was going to stop to pick up. And Hauser calls me, and he almost never calls me on the phone because we just text each other. And so I see how they're calling, like, oh great, helicopter won't start. There's got to be a problem if he's actually calling me. So I answer the phone and he's just like. Doesn't say anything. I'm like, yeah. And he goes, he's something like, dude, I see lights in the frickin sky. It's this strange red light. I'm like, you're serious? And he just paused. He goes, dude is freaking me out. I'm 100% serious. And so I rushed out here and by the time I got here, they had taken off and I saw nothing. And then I get on the Internet, start checking, and then some people in the area were reporting seeing something strange in the sky that was red. And I. So I found a video from somebody local and I sent it to him and he goes, dude, that's exactly what I saw, right? And so other people saw the same thing and there was videos that came up on it. And then in the past month, since I've been watching this stuff popping up all over, I saw the same thing. Like it was like the series of red lights because somebody said it was a flare, right? They're going, oh, that's just flares over the local air force base. And so I found some content that looked like it. And actually when I was in Vegas this last trip, I asked Taz, who was with the military, I'm like, is this flares? And he's looked at, he goes, that's absolutely not flares, right? So this weird thing that Hauser saw and other people saw, I had verified by a military pilot, he was lieutenant colonel. And he goes, dude, that video, that is not flares what you're looking at. So something did in our area even happened strange at night in the sky. But unfortunately I didn't get to see it. So I'm always looking and I want to see something strange. I just haven't. So I just got to go off all these videos popping up. Anything else? Well, because I'm just curious.

I want to know what people think I know. So nobody's really telling of their own conspiracies aside from that guy in the sky is very adamant that there are no aliens, that we're lucky, that Earth has life. Here's my argument on that, here's my conspiracy.

Go for it.

And I think it's just, I think we know more about space than we do our own oceans. That's a fact. NASA has put, you know, we have put way more spacecraft out than we have into our oceans. But one thing that I'd like to argue when it comes down to the basis of life, is just because the laws of our galaxy, of our planet says that oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide, just because that determines our life, does not mean that there's not another planet out there that has unknown elementals that creates their life. I think there's a whole different way of laws that apply, apply to guarantee and claim what is life.

Well, and there's so much now, you know, even military footage of stuff going in and out of the ocean, right, Filmed by naval ships, and most of that stuff I never really paid any attention to. And you hear about underground bases, underwater bases, and, you know, you hear all this stuff. And for the longest time I was like, man, you know, just never paid that much attention to it. And then I just recently watched another podcast and with this dude who was 100% credible, and the guy was ex military, but also his main focus of his life for 30 years has been studying the oceans. And he said, I can't tell you what's going on. I can't tell you what it is, but there is most definitely some strange things going on in the oceans. And when he was asked, he said, could it be, you know, could this be an ancient civilization long before us, this still here? And he goes, could be. I can't tell you.

It's not.

But he goes, I can tell you there's definitely some weird stuff going on and, you know, verified a lot of stuff. And it was like, it's just crazy when you really start digging into it. And most of the time at first I'm like, ah, nah. But then when you, when you sometimes you watch in some science behind things and you go, hmm, is that plausible? You know, I like to keep an.

Open mind and I don't know the exact time frame of this, but I know if you were to put the start, like the moment Earth became a planet and began creating life all the way down to currently, you know, the Homo sapiens and in our, you know, us as humans, you can fit human timeline, like on your fingernail, that's how long and Earth's beginning and time that we have been on this planet. And so who's to say, you know, we have so much history that we are still uncovering, we have so much history of just, you know, what, what was our life? You know, the great, the great pyramids.

Those.

When Romans first invaded into Egypt and discovered the pyramids. Discovered. I'll put that in quotes because obviously they were already known. Those were already as ancient to the Romans as they are to us.

Sure.

And you know, I watch anything and.

Everything that I could find on the pyramids.

Right.

And I've heard tons of theories and I, and I, and I'll, I'll listen to it.

All right.

I just, I want to learn. I want to hear what's plausible.

Like yeah, evolution is always, is always possible. Evolution. I believe in evolution. I think that's a known fact. And you know, long after we are gone, Earth is still going to be here. Aside from any other, you know, universal catastrophe that would cause our planet to no longer exist.

Well, something that you know, you said some stuff you heard and then kind of like the last couple months, all this stuff going on when you first said, well you know, this could be happening because of administration change, blah blah blah. And I never heard that till you said that. And then this thing I was watching last night, the guy's basically saying there's some disclosure coming soon. Not alien disclosure, disclosure whistleblowers from these black ops that are responsible for a lot of this stuff that you're seeing. Now this, this guy who actually goes around talks to leaders of countries says that coming before January 20th, there is going to be some whistleblowers come forward who are involved in whatever it is. Not alien, that's. It's a man made thing that even a lot of the governments aren't aware of. And supposedly that's going to happen within the next couple weeks. So I guess we'll see.

Heather asked in chat what about Sam Squatches? You read Sasquatches?

Well, you know, since you brought that up. Gloria and I used to watch that when she was little. Right. And I don't watch much of it anymore. Do I think there is? I'd like to believe so. But I'm with a lot of people who just say this is still the best you got. Right. Like with amount of cameras that we have now and everybody having a camera in their pocket 20 years ago is one thing. But now nobody has a better quality video than what we have. Right. Like that's why I'm doubtful. Could it be. Could there be a species? Could be. But I just, I saw something that popped up the other day and shows everywhere there was sightings and it showed lots in Indiana. And I'm like in Indiana, where would. I mean our wooded areas are so small in Indiana. I don't know how they could be here, living in Indiana.

Right?

Like, I just don't see it. Maybe out in the pacific northwest, you know, where you got thousands of acres. Could there be something like a bigfoot? I ain't ruling it completely out, But I also think at this point we ought to have something, some kind of evidence.

I have a Would you rather question for you, Kenny, Heather and everybody in chat. Okay, here's a Would you rather. Would you rather find. You find the perfect person for you? Dream person. They're absolutely everything you want in life, but they are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and have a poor credit card history. You can't dig them out. Can't dig them out of debt. Perfect person. They're in debt. Or would you rather have. Again, perfect person, dream person. You love them. They're perfect for you. They are deep in sasquatch lore. Every weekend they're out hunting for sasquatch. Every weekend. And 24, seven, that's all they talk about, is their belief in the sasquatch.

Oh, man. At first I was going to say sasquatch, but I don't know.

You don't know if you could deal with 247 talks of Sasquatch and hunting trips for that?

Well, I don't know.

20.

If they're that much in debt, they're 24 hours is going to be talking about how broke they are and how that would be pretty. Either way would be pretty difficult. Man, that's a tough one. If you had to put a gun to my head, I had to choose. I think I'd go for the sasquatch girl.

I mean, they don't have to look like sasquatch. They just have to really believe in them.

I mean, if you're making me pick. If you're making me pick. All right, we better go back to some helicopter. Unless there's anybody else got anything good on the aliens or the lights in New Jersey.

Just everybody's just been commenting Sasquatch. My brother is married to one. Heather said that she. Guess she's living in a van down the river.

Well, people don't really want to talk about it. I brought this up Saturday night at Rex's. Late. It was late night when it was the normal crew. And I'm like, all right, guys, what's going on? What do you think about the Jersey lights? And everybody just sat there like bumps on logs. I'm like, come on, people, you gotta have an idea. And everybody just kinda go like, eh, eh, eh. Like nobody gave a shit. And I Know, my daughter and her boyfriend are kind of like that. I'm like, what do you think about all this stuff going on? These lights in the sky? You know what he thinks? He's like, I don't know. Right? Like, he just doesn't care. All right, so what do we do? Do we give? Should we roll the video, Give away something? What are we doing?

What do we have to give away? I feel like we've cleared out.

Is anybody still watching? Well, did Heather, did you get that order to go through that you were working on?

I think so.

I guess we'll see. Okay.

Still give away that.

All right, let's give him some helicopter. We were gonna do the. Oh, I got it. We're gonna show you a video from one of our past customers. Was here for a final approach course in the R44. And Dylan spent a lot of time on this video. So this is reference. Our final approach courses in the R44. Let's roll. W. Yeah.

Getting signed.

The picture, the hug while pain.

Just anywhere.

Anywhere.

Yeah, Perfect.

Love it.

Cool. Awesome.

That was awesome.

I actually really like that. When the door came right at the end.

Was that cool?

Yeah.

And you can make some good music in there.

Whatever you want.

It's going to be some suspense.

You got some cash for me? Put the flight home?

Yep. This is for me paying you for letting me ride around with you and give you advice on what to do and what not to do. Here's your reward.

Thank you, sir. You know, it's funny.

I pay all my students. Yeah, I pay. I pay for you to come fly with me. I pay you for it because I'm so desperate for content. I can't believe you just handed me this, that I have to pay people.

Pretty important stuff here, dude.

It is. I didn't want to put down when to give it to Heather because she's putting it in a thingy over there.

So it's funny. I got Kenny on the way back because as a commercial pilot now, you get paid to fly, right? But you can't just go get paid to fly. But there's certain elements that allow you to get paid to fly. So obviously I'm here and I'm paying for my time and helicopter.

We're flying back.

And I said, okay, this is the first time I'm actually getting paid to fly. He goes, what are you talking about? I'm like. He goes, no, you can't. And I go, well, this is your helicopter and I'm flying you. And there is a provision in the far that says if he's the owner and he's asked me to fly, he pays me. So.

Right.

And I told him to pay flight back, you know, and I told him to f off.

I'd sent him an invoice for Toddles Aviation.

I said, no, you don't. So Heather, you gonna be in this with us since you rode along today?

Yeah, come on in.

So we were all here. We were all here and took off at 6:30am we said we're gonna lift at 6:30. It was probably 6:35. I said, we always preach to get there an hour early. And we did arrive an hour early. And guess what? We land. I go, he'll be here by like 7:15. It's like 7:05. And by the time I get out of the helicopter, here comes the examiner across the ramp. Hey, bring in the registration. And the error. That's. Would you. Okay. So scheduled for 8, we got there at 7. We climb out and here he comes across the ramp.

So yeah, he was on it.

And that's what they like, right? If your scheduled time is 8, be there at 7 or 6:30.

Yep.

So.

The brand new commercial pilot, Todd Ketterman, all the for Florida, longtime Hogs member. Nobody wants to hear me. I talk all the time on the video. YouTube. Yeah.

I mean this was an incredible experience. I mean just to be here and work with Kenny and meet the whole crew and Heather and just have this, you know, to go, to go through, to brush up, to get ready for the commercial. It was more than just here, fly and do this.

It was the experience.

It was all of hogs. It was all of you guys just giving me that time. I mean, it was very concierge in the way in which it was brought together. We had food, we had everything we needed. I got to spend as much time here. We got to brush up on stuff. We were able to just come out and fly. To do anything, I mean that's unheard of to have that. But the experience of being here just to calm down, just to be here.

And.

It was just incredible. I can honestly say that, you know, if you are in any way at a point where, you know, you're ready to go for a cert, you're ready to do, you know, that prep work and you need that one on one, no pressure. You got the instructor, you got the airport, you got the whole inside. You got couches, you got food, you got drink, you got, got water, you got coffee. You just got everything you need. The setting is incredible. There's a Real. There's a real feeling in this place that just kind of gets you in the right headspace. So I can't say enough about what Kenny, Heather, the whole team here has put together to come out and do that. So just, again, if you're at a point where you're ready to have that experience and have something really, really cool, that's just gonna, you know, dust off the edges, the rough edges, and get you ready and pumped up, there's no other place, I guarantee you that's gonna get you ready for that because it's one on one. You're not fighting with schedules, you're not fighting with people. Kenny gave me him to work with as an instructor. Incredible stuff. And, yeah. So, Kenny, thank you. Thank you to the whole, whole crew, Heather. I mean, just everybody. Again, I can't say enough. Get out here. Come see it for yourself. It works. It's amazing. And yeah, come on out. Sign up.

It usually just takes a few finishing touches. People think that maybe they're struggling, and then it show a little trick here, a little trick there, a little something over here, and the produce, and you go, wow, you solved. Find a way to solve those problems that seem like a big problem. And then you go, hey, here, try this. And you go, wow, I've been struggling.

With that all along.

Do it this way. Alternative method. Boom.

Well, getting ready for the checkride anyway is stressful. So you got all the. You got all the knowledge stuff. You know, you got everything that you need. Kenny put together this incredible binder that just puts everything together. It's got the 8710, it's got Fars, it's got study notes, it's got everything that you need to be putting so that. That comes off your workload. Now you've got the helicopter. You can spend as much time as you need with a helicopter. Kenny's here to go through stuff, coach. You get out, do work. So again, just to be able to have that and to come in, clear your mind, and just be in this space, it's incredible.

Well, and you saw firsthand now what you've heard me preach in the videos for a year now, that you've been a HOGS member or longer than that, because you've been watching for a long time. But how much effort to that.

As.

You mentioned, the binder, the 8710, all the paperwork is the real battle. And this morning, the fact that we were on time and the 8710 was done last night, and there was no problem there. And Then the first thing the examiner does is looks over the log books, looks over your logbook, looks over the endorsements, and when he went, okay, looks good, then as you're like, all right, the worst part's over. Yeah, you still got to do an oral, and you still got to do a flight. But getting through that and we made that seamless, which. You had your own hand in that by being super prepared.

I mean, there's work. There's work as you have to do. You got to bring the stuff together. You got to bring your A game. You know, you have to be willing to kind of pull it all together. But it's put in such a way that it's laid out. It's methodical. Right. It kind of goes with Kenny's whole slow, methodical. Just. Let's make sure we got everything buttoned up again. When that's done, you can ease your brain down, you can get into this. You can do the stuff that you need to be ready.

Yeah. He came from a different environment. That's not. Let me rephrase this. The typical person that will come here, I'm going do that a little slower. Slow that down. Make that smoother. Move that a little bit less. That's what I preached the whole time, and you were no different than anybody else. The majority of my job is just go, yeah, that was okay, but do that slower. Hey, that collective movement. Do that a little bit less hat. Remember, I go, you're doing it this much. Do half of that.

Yeah.

And it was. That's the key. I mean, little small movements and getting you. We did it in a day and a half, though. We did it Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday, and then we're off to the bat. I'm going, okay. All I'm going to be doing for the next day is I'm going to be trying you to slow everything down that you do. It's all just a little bit too macho or aggressive. Take all that stuff and just easier, more gentle, smoother.

I remember the first night I got in, we sat down, you know, we laid everything out just to see where we're at. But once we got beyond that, it's like, let's go fly. Let's go see where we're at. And we went out. You got to kind of evaluate where I was, what I'm doing. Put it down, came back in, landed, go in, sit down, chill.

Right?

Because that's other part of it is the couches.

Well, now we go in, right?

We got a coffee table, two couches.

It's amazing.

Right beside the helicopter, right beside the log books, beside the oil, beside the.

I mean, if you toilet, the paper.

Towels, the maintenance log, we have it all packed in one end of the hangar where. Yeah, like Todd said, he can go over and look at the helicopter. He can look at the poh. Sit back down, grab the maintenance logs. Oh, you need a quart of oil. Oh, it's over here. Oh, you need a paper towel. Need the funnel. We got it all right here. We even got the maintenance table for the mechanic. He can back up to the door and comes right in and boom. There's the workbench, there's the helicopter. We got it all right here in the corner.

Again, the experience of what you have here, you don't get it. You just don't. This whole thing that you've created, it puts you in the right mindset. It puts you in it. You're just there. You don't have to think, McKenna, what you've got is incredible. So I can tell you, from the moment I got here, my mind, I could shut off the rest of the world. I could turn it off. And I felt covered. I was able to come here and just focus on this. That's great.

Yep. And I put it together kind of for you for this one week. But as I was putting it together, I was here with myself, arranging things at night, and all sudden I went, this is what I've always wanted.

Yeah, this is.

I've done it in different forms and fashions, but the whole time, I've always been trying to get it to where it is all in one and it's right here. And I just finally figured out after 20 some years. And I went, all of a sudden, this is what I've always wanted. This is how I want to do flight training. And we go right out the door. Fuel truck comes. It went right into the pattern. We don't have to fly to another airport. We have to deal with a tower. We just.

It's.

It's just get right to business.

Well, I remember again that. That first sign, we're. We're sitting inside, it's getting a little bit late. We knew where the check ride was going to happen.

And I.

That's an unfamiliar airport to me. I've never flown there. And I said, hey, Kenny, why don't we fly over? And he kind of looked at me, goes, oh, you want to go?

And I go, yeah. We opened up the doors, we came.

Out, we filled up and we went. We went over, checked it out, did a nice Little sunset flight back landed, sat back down, kept going. So again, that's just the other thing I was gonna say is even if you're not a helicopter pilot, you just want to come out and feel like one and be around it and sit and go for flight, you know, I don't think you'd be opposed to that at all.

It's cool.

It's.

It's less stress for us dealing with four different people in one day. We got one person to cater to and take care of it. Talk to them ahead of time, see what their needs are. And then when you walk in the door, we're ready to go.

Yeah.

Talk. Do a little bit of ground. Talk about what we're gonna do pre flight the aircraft, push it out, get some fuel, and away we go.

Yeah.

So come out schedule. Get in with these guys.

Lunch on the charcoal grill.

Lunch on the charcoal grill.

They laugh at my little cheapy hand me down charcoal grill. But we're not gonna give it all away.

But there are really cool things about this place that you just have to come out and experience. So make it your own. Make it your experience. But thank you, guys. Thank you. Awesome.

Thank you.

Heather, Congratulations.

Thanks, Kenny.

How about some bears? Okay, fine. Thank you. He walked away from the hug. Yeah, I was being manly. How about them bears? Bears. Because I have figured. Todd.

Live, Live.

Live, Live, Live, Live.

I know.

So the hoodie we gave away, it's going to India and we failed today. Say we don't ship out of the country. So Heather jumped online and shipped that direct from the people that do the hoodies where you can buy them. Hogshoodies.com you can purchase. So since we ordered that one because we personally, us Shipping out of the country is a hassle at the post office. Like, I don't know. Or the. It's just a hassle shipping out of the country. So we're going to give this away. Another one.

Same one. Same one.

Because the other one other winner, he's getting shipped direct. So we're going to give away 2x hoodie right now. That's it. That's all we got for right now. That's the last of stock 2x hogs hoodie. Zip up just like the one I'm wearing right here. And the simple answer. Well, simple, if you don't know anything about aircraft, you might know answer. But it's simple for people that have been around it. So we initiate. We call this the poh. What is the. What is poh? What does it mean? Spelling properly the actual Term P. What's P stand for? O. What's the O stand for? And what's Handbook? Whoops. I just gave you the third one.

Poh. What does poh.

What is the poh spell correctly? I want it spelled. Spelled the way it's spelled in the front of this book right here in my hot.

May I see the book again? Okay. I mean.

Got a winner?

Well, it depends on how. How picky, how nitpicky you want me to be.

They don't have to have the apostrophe, but they have to have it with those letters.

Okay. All right. David Talbot.

All right, David. You are the winner of the 2x hogs. Zip up hoodie. If you got any questions, put your. Type your questions in there. We're going to do a hovering video next. This was from when I did my. I got freshened up with the guys down at actually specifically Gavin with straight up aviation. I went down, flew with Gavin in Florida before we took delivery of the R44 that we have now to do my flight review and get freshened up. And I got down there and he's like, well, hey, tomorrow Ryan wants to fly with you. Okay, so then, hey, tomorrow, the next day somebody else wants to fly with you. And then I end up flying there every day, the whole week flying with their students. And that weekend he's like, well, I got this weekend booked for you, too, and then I got some flights next week. And I'm like, whoa, hang on. We're here on vacation, too. So anyway, we had a blast down there, and Gavin and I went out and shot a hovering video. So we. So we're going to do that next. Before showing the hovering video, ask any questions. We need to run down hogspaysme.com, become an affiliate, and you can make 50%. That link is below. So anybody can become affiliate, particularly for you instructors. You want to make some extra money to put in your pocket, must have a PayPal account. And after 30 days after purchase, we send you 50% commissions on anybody that signs up for hogs, whether it's a monthly, a yearly, a pro pilot. Pro pilot sells for 2,800. So your student that goes for pro pilot for 2800. We will send you 1400 dollars after the 30 days and ask hogs dot com. We've been mentioning it all day. It's a clone you can talk to 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That link is down below. We have a sale going on till the end of New Year's Day 11:59. PM New Year's Day. 40% off. Private pilot, commercial pilot, certified flight instructor, instrument pilot and pro pilot. You can go monthly on the individuals, the private commercial instrument cfi. You can go monthly. You can go yearly or monthly. Yearly. Or you can go pro pilot.

Get them all.

Keep them forever. For right now, 40% off. Santa. 40 is the code. So Lindsay has the links in the description box down below the video. You can go direct to any of those memberships. Do me a favor and subscribe the channel. If you haven't yet, subscribe the channel. I'm trying to get to 50,000 subscribers. Personal favor. Just do it for me if you haven't. I want to hit 50,000 subscribers and then after that I don't care. I just. It's a goal I've had for years. Now we're around 47,000. We've got 600 in the last month, which I super appreciate. That may be more than we've ever got in 30 days. And hopefully it's because we're doing more fresh content, doing more live, giving you R22 and R44 content and plenty more.

Of that to come.

We've been going live every day and we've been having fun with this. We're winding down on this one because we all want to get out of here today. But we're going to do at least that video, maybe something else real quick if people keep hanging in there. We got like 33 people in there last I looked, which is awesome. This many hours in a lot in a live event. So. And let me take a moment just to thank everybody for going on 14 years. You know, this has been incredible. I started with nothing and now we have created this thing. We've got the Hogs Wall of Fame back there. We've connected people with all over the world. The Hogs Wall, famous, not rolling right now. We paused it to make a video yesterday and never put it back in action. But the Hogs Wall of Fame rolls behind us, starts. Private pilots over there, instrument pilots, commercial pilots and certified flight instructors. And those videos just roll in the background. And when you pass a check ride, send us a picture. If you've used Hogs, you're a member. You pass your checkride, send us a picture because you're excited, you're happy. And we send you, you the mini no go button after you pass the checkride and we just ask to write a sentence or two. Very simple. Hey, you know, the video has helped me tremendously to get through the oral, whatever the case is. And we Send you the no go. And we haven't had anybody send a picture in a while. So if you did your checkride last week, send it in. If it's been six months ago, you got your rating and you never sent us the picture, send it in. If it was two years ago, I don't care. We just want to highlight some fresh ones going up on the wall. Each day we went live, we had a little something ready to go and highlighted a few of them. Today we didn't because we had the rotor tips video queued up for you and we rolled that. So, Lindsay, any questions pop up?

I have quite a few.

Okay.

What, what is the difference between The Robinson Raven 1 and the Raven 2?

Biggest difference as far as I know is Raven 1 is what we have and that is carbureted. And the Raven 2 is fuel injected. So not that much different between the aircraft other than the, you know, you got to operate the carb heat on the carbureted, you don't have to on the fuel injected one, but not really a big deal. I wanted a Raven 2 when we got the one that we have, I wanted a Raven 2. However, when I was talking to the guys that leased these aircraft, a friend of mine, and he's like, well, we don't have any Raven twos right now. However, we have a Raven one that is yellow and black. Which immediately got my attention. And he said, it's fresh out of overhaul. It's sitting down. Sevier county, they're putting the finishes, finishing touches on it. It's got like four hours on it. And I'm like, okay, I'll take it. Right. So I chose the raven one because it was fresh out of overhaul. It's a 2016, so I'm getting like as close as you can get to a brand new aircraft that's not new. And I trust the guys at Sevier County Choppers with the work they do. And, and yellow and black. You can't see my yellow and black car, but it's been my favorite for years. I run, I operated tow trucks for 10 years and I got into semis, tractor trailers, and my trucks were yellow and black. It was the. Just my, my colors, yellow and black. So that's the big difference between the Raven one and. Or the. You asked me Raven one and Raven two about both.

Yeah. They asked what was the difference between both. What is the best place to look for a used helicopter?

This is from Barry, that I really couldn't tell you because I haven't, I don't get online and look around. I mean, there's barnstormers, there's. Man, I don't even know what's online anymore. I'm sure there's all kinds of different, probably places online you can search for aircraft. Because I don't look for them. I wouldn't, I wouldn't know. Right. I, I've owned one, but again, I bought that one years ago through the network of people that I know. I just bought it direct through somebody that I knew the least. Helicopter I got, I got. It was through somebody that I knew. It was through networking. I've, I've never, I've never went looking for a helicopter. So I just couldn't tell you. I don't know. Type in chat. If anybody's in here and you know some good popular places to look for aircraft, type it in the chat. Help out the person on this question, because I don't know.

This next one comes from that guy in the sky. And why do you not do ATP theories?

Well, ATP, from what I understand is a really, a glorified instrument checkride. And so, you know, somebody wants to do an ATP. We certainly could. Hauser's an instruments instructor, so we could help you with that if somebody wanted to. But I've never, in 24 years of teaching, only one time was I ever involved with somebody that did an ATP.

That's it.

And that was when I worked in Cleveland and I wasn't the instrument instructors, but they said, hey, go, go out with this guy and freshen him up in the Schweitzer. Because he was flying a turbine aircraft and he was as a news pilot and he wanted to get his instrument rating. And then one of the instrument instructors worked with him on the instrument stuff. So ATP is just not that many people get it in helicopters. So there's not a lot of reason for me to really push for that because people just don't generally get it. It's a rating. You can get it, but you don't need it unless you're going to fly something 12,500 or above. And again, we could help you with that. But as far as teaching it, since.

Training instrument stuff, do you have any plans for a Bell 206?

I would love to have a Bell 206. I would absolutely love it. One of my favorite aircraft of all time, I got to fly A Bell 206B3 in Cleveland for the news reporting. And that's what helped me get my career going. I was like 800 or a thousand hours working for this company that Had a Jet Ranger and I used to to get to go along on the news reporting. It was with the woman that I worked for. Her and her husband owned the aircraft. They had a news reporting. So if I didn't have a student, she got a news call, she'd let me go and she'd let me fly the thing. So I had about 80 hours flying around in the 206 with her getting dual and then at a certain point she got pregnant and at a certain point had to quit flying and they asked me to take over flying the Jet Ranger. So I flew it for a weeks of couple a couple years. Got 250 hours in them. And I absolutely love the 206 V3 so I'd love to have one but ain't in my budget. You know turbine aircraft we've proved this year. I've been mentioning this past week. Heather did the math. I think Heather did the math. Ira did the math. Heather did the math. The R44 this year called cost us 803.17 an hour to operate for 2024. So that's an R44. So to operate a 206. Oh man. I can remember back a buddy of mine owned one and this was 20 years ago and he was like no matter how you slice it, hands down a 206 going to cost you 600 an hour a minimum to operate. So that was 20 years ago. We know everything now is not doubled, hell just in the last few years. So I would imagine to operate a 206 you'd probably have to generate thousand or twelve hundred dollars an hour just to pay for it. And then you got to try to charge people. I would never. I don't see us ever having enough people coming through the door here to justify a 206. I would love it. I would love to own one but just out of my. Out of my price range. There's no way for me to afford a 206. Wish I could somebody one of our Hogs members. You need to buy one, bring it here and I can help you learn to fly it. No doubt. And we could mess around with it and have some fun and I could probably sell a few turbine courses here and there, but just out of my price range.

Next question. This one's coming from Oscar and they were taught or trained to do practice autos with governor off. What are your thoughts?

Well, good question. I know that over the I started flying in 97 and that's changed a couple times I believe back when I started, we were doing governor off, and then somewhere along the way, Robinson changed their mind and decided we needed to do autos with governor on. So I do what the factory recommends. I don't do governor off unless it's I do governor off for. Well, for example, in a normal course of training, we go out here with somebody and we'll have them fly several patterns and some approaches and takeoffs without the governor so that you learn how to operate the helicopter if the governor ever fails. But I think they decided it was just too many problems with leaving the governor off. So unless something has changed that I don't know about, you leave the governor on. And if you check the PoH in the auto rotation practice autation, it does not say turn governor off. So I stick with the. With the manufacturer's recommendation on things. That's my deal, you know, and it's just like the. On the governor on the slide startup, people ask me, well, you know, we like to do the startup without the governor. I don't have a problem with that. A lot of people come here, want to do that because that's the way they trained. And if they trained that way, I allow it and go, okay, that's fine. But we use the factory Checklist in the R22 and R44 both, and the checklist does not tell us to turn the governor off. So only thing it does, I believe, is check that the governor is on. So I do the startup with the. The governor on. I do the flying with the governor on. I do the flying. The flying startup. I do it with governor Ron. Unless specifically to give them the training of flying with the governor off so they know they can do it. But. And, and I'll give you a little more on that. Back when I started, I've told this story many times. I won't go in the whole thing right now, but I had a guy almost kill us in a 180 auto and he flipped the governor off. And then in the middle of the auto go bad, and it was like, confusing. It's like, governor on, governor off. Now the auto's going bad and you're flipping it off. Why are you doing that? It made too much confusion. So I leave governor on during the autos.

Okay, so we have a little bit of a discrepancy in chat, and a lot of people are wanting that zip up hoodie Kenny.

Yeah.

So when are we gonna have to order some more?

I'll be. You know, I like being transparent with hogs. Right. Like, and we. And I'd love to know the number and not anybody really cares, but I'm sure we've given away. Where's Heather? Don't you guess that we've given away $30,000 worth of stuff in the last.

Yes.

Six, seven years? Right. Like, we are generous and we give back. The reason I slowed down on buying stuff like hoodies, jackets, T shirts. The reason why. You want to know why, Is because right there in the R44, that will be coming home soon. Those are the reasons we don't have stock right now. Right. Like, it's not that I can't afford it, but when we were buying stuff and giving stuff away all the time, it was like, you know, you have that kind of built in your budget, and these helicopters are freaking expensive. And, you know, the. I'll give you the numbers just for fun. So the end of 2024, we figured. What was it, Heather? We figured we've. Our expenses for the two aircraft have been what, 100,000 or 120,000? Yeah, we got about 120,000 in expenses, and they've generated about 100,000. So that means we've lost 20 grand, which I'm not complaining because we're in business. And the helicopters help us move the business forward and helps us with videos, but, you know, we just haven't had the budget for it, so. So we just haven't stocked a lot, haven't done a lot of those giveaways. And we've been giving away books heavy for the last week because I had purchased recently a lot of books. Books. So the books were the giveaway. And then we thought, well, heck, let's give away the last few hoodies we got over here as a fun giveaway. And I'm not opposed to getting some more. And we can soon. Just in general. We'd been doing less giving away because, you know, you get a slow month or two, and it's like, okay, everybody, no extras right now. It's. We're paying the bills, making our paychecks because there's three of us that work here that all rely on our paycheck from hogs. So we just been a little less. The hell we've given away. We figured out three grand worth of stuff in the last 14 days. So we do give back, but we just been a little light on those kinds of things. But we'll get back to it. We'll order some more soon and we'll do some more. Since you're asking for it. Yeah. Because I'm going to need another one of These soon because I wear these things out fast, so. So after this big sale, we'll order some more hoodies. Nice.

What are, are we done with giveaways for today or are we giving away?

I don't know. No, no, because we still got another video.

We do. We have Robinson R44 hover square pattern.

Yep. So this, this is a good video and this is something that can help you out. I've talked about this just in the last week too. More than once I've told people about this technique to help build their skills. So, any other questions? Are we caught up?

Are you sure you don't want to give Copter Bob, AKA Robert Gardner, the Jeep Wrangler? It has brand new tires on it.

Yeah, 1400 bucks. And I'm proud. And I'll tell you what, it's a.

Little stinky though, Bob. I don't know if you want it.

You don't got to tell them about my stinky Jeep. Look, I ran, I bought that Jeep 2016, I think with 48,000 miles. I put 100,000 miles on the tires that were on there. BF Goodrich Radial TA. Then one of them was friggin bald, I mean bald. And the other three were pretty shitty. So I am so thrilled to have my fresh tires on there and I can't believe how much better it rides and it drives and it's amazing and so I'm so thrilled. But that's what took me so long, right? Like again operating freaking helicopters. And I, and I say it with a smile on my face. We enjoy the hell out of them, we like flying them and I have them here. They're not the money makers. Everybody thinks that's the reason why I finally, why I've been driving on bald tires on my damn Jeep was waiting to scrounge up the freaking money to be able to put tires on the Jeep. 1400 bucks. But they're there and I'm glad they're on.

Somebody's more than welcome to buy my Honda Pilot. I'm more than ready to get that away of.

Well, there you go. Honda Pilot for sale. How much? What year?

2013. And well, I have about quite a, quite a loan to pay off of it. So if you want to give me about $6,000 for my interest and that.

Don'T sound bad, I might want it for six grand. Sold. That'd be a shop, that'd be a good shop vehicle.

Yeah, it would.

Yeah it would. Well think about that. Because the old hogs, the old, the old equinox, the One I was driving all those years ago when I was broke sitting over here. And it just, I think it's to the end. We're almost 200,000 miles on that. I've been kind of wanting to replace it and I just saw I could get a new Equinox for 0% financing, no payments for 90 days. I was thinking about that for a shop car. But anyway, so we got sidetracked.

Robinson 44, square pattern rolling in right now.

Okay, so we're going to do a few hovering exercises here. What we should do is make sure we know where the wind is coming from and what that is going to do to the helicopter. Right now it looks like the wind is coming kind of from the west. So it's a left side of the helicopter, the left crosswind right now. So as we pick up, we'll do our two step pickup, nice and gentle and we'll anticipate a little bit of wind input from the left hand side. As we raise in the collective, we're going to add a little bit of left pedal. And as we get light on the skids for our two step pickup, we'll use our pedals to counteract any yaw and we'll use our cyclic to counteract any drifting. Stabilize ourselves in a hover. Just give our engine gauges and our instruments a check. Over.

Hey. This is a wonderful technique for honing your skills in the helicopter, your hovering skills. This footage is from my recent flight review and flight refresher in the Robinson R44 with Gavin from Straight Up Aviation in Fort Myers, Florida. I was thrilled to find out that he uses the same technique that I do with students. We both agreed this is one of the best ways for students to hone your skills with the hovering square pattern. So we'll get right back to it. I want to tell you there's a free download below for our helicopter maneuver guide. You can go down below the video, click on that link and download our maneuver guide for free. Free PDF.

The basic hovering exercises, pedal turns, pick up, set downs and then a little hover taxi around the area as long as you have space to do it. So any combination of pedal turns, we do 90 degree pedal turns, 180 degree pedal turns both to the left and the right. The slower the better, shows more control. And then eventually we do 360 degree pedal turns all the way around.

Ah, that feels good.

I knew we forgot something. Or even two. They don't put the AC on the checklist there, but yeah, that's a good call.

There, that should be added. And I'm gonna do one to the right. And I think I'll throw in a couple of 180s too. Just because while I got her there filming and I got.

Why not?

This is stuff I can do even where I'm just showing footage. And if I'm doing, you know, voiceover.

Yeah.

Well, I'll admit it, I'm getting tired now. I feel good, but I'm like, I'm. I'm not like, I do a couple of 180s. Tell clear. Right. I miss at that point where for me, the longer the days go, the longer the day goes on, it is harder for me to shoot video. Yeah. The more hours I've been up, the more I've used my brain.

And the other thing is, I like. It's hot in Florida. Like, we got 23 Celsius right now, you know, that's 74 Fahrenheit here. And right now it's kind of dry. It's not as humid. Normally in Florida it's humid, so you don't dehydrate as much. But right now we've got very dry air around here. And then with the heat and of course, sitting in this plastic bubble, you know, you dehydrate over the course of the day as well. Yeah, that makes you tired. You want to talk about hover height at all, how high your skid should be from the ground? Because, you know, you ask different people, you're going to get different opinions. If you ask the examiners, they say 3 to 5ft is a very safe hover height.

Sure.

But if you're doing these hover maneuvers around the ramp here, a little bit closer to the ground, couple of feet, as long as there's no obstacles around, as long as everything's going to be clear from the skids and the tail.

Going to do kind of a square pattern. I'll go over here, set it down, pick it up. I'll turn right, go that way a little ways and do our. Go ahead. I'm going to go ahead and do that and you can go ahead and if you feel like talking.

Okay, keep talking. So you sit down on the corners, right. You do the set downs on the corners, then pick up, do a 90 degree turn and then head down the next leg of the. Of the pattern.

This is really good for me, too.

So as we're doing this exercise where we're basically going to draw a square or a rectangle out with a helicopter as you go around the different legs of the traffic pattern, what you also get the benefit of is the different directions of wind. So at some stage you'll have a headwind, at some stage you'll have a tailwind, you'll have a left crosswind and a right crosswind. And it's often interesting when people are doing this to realize that that wind blowing from a different direction on the side of the helicopter or the back of the helicopter makes a difference in your control inputs for your set downs and your pickups, particularly if that wind gets kind of strong. Today we got not too strong a wind. We've got a nice calm day.

But.

Sometimes on the stronger wind days, it makes it a little bit more challenging. And then at every set down, we make sure we pull all the pitch out of the blades, put the collective all the way down, but all of the way to the helicopter back on the skids. So we do a full set down and then a full pickup. Clear left on the side.

Oh, it's good too, because she's getting the helicopter from both the sun behind her and in front of her. So we're getting some really nice footage right now of the aircraft from different angles with the sun.

Awesome.

Hitting it different directions.

It's a nice metallic paint as well. So those at the sun on it'll be nice and reflective.

Oh, yeah, it will. When I edit, I always try to edit to where I catch the little glimmers of sun as they like slide up and down. The whoops as they slide up and down the aircraft. You know, when it's turning. This will be good stuff. I recently checked the one today, the video I have on this topic, and I'm like, oh, my God, it's so old.

Yeah, I can imagine you constantly want to be updating. Right. You'll think, oh, damn, I missed that one. I should have put that in there. Or yes, I could have done that differently.

All the time. Five minutes after I do it, I go. By the time I'm done, I'm like, that's good, that's good. I don't like that. I wish I had done this. But yeah, that's how you learn. Like everything else.

And also the technology advances. Right. So the cameras you were using five years ago.

Yeah.

Oh, it's don't compare.

No, it's unbelievable how much better it gets. Even stuff I was shooting two years ago, I was using an older GoPro for the audio part and for a couple of shots, and I was like, oh, my God, that footage is gross. Absolutely gross.

Did I put my name on that?

Oh, my God, trust me. Heather's constantly going, it's fine.

Yeah.

So clear left, it's fine. Quit worrying about it. But then I did make myself feel better. I got looking at around the Internet on YouTube, and I'm like, oh, yeah, find some real comparison. I feel some real crud out there.

Yeah. Now, another interesting thing we do with students is, you know, when they're comfortable with hovering is have them look at the grass. So when you're hovering, like, for example, here, closer to the grass, and when you come down, you take out the picture of the blades. So it kind of gives them an idea of where their downwash goes to, like, how far out it goes. And then you can bring in the whole. Well, you know, if you're hovering around other aircraft, just be careful of what you're doing, because your downwash actually does extend quite a way out there.

Yep.

And then, of course, there's the great exercise of, you know, when you're doing takeoffs over the grass, when all of a sudden you hit ETL and the. The grass is perfectly stationary out front of you.

Yep. All right, I'm going to go back around the whole square, the other direction. This is actually. This is really good for me, just to date for me getting back in it. This is really, really, really good for me.

We'll do that with. And you have this too, right? You'll do that with students, and they'll say, okay, you'll do your 10 hours of solo now. So when they're ready for their solo, I normally send them out on their cross country first thing. You're doing your solo now.

Okay.

Today you're gonna plan your flight, gonna pick up and go do a cross country, and then, you know, work out where you're going, or you're gonna talk to you, what you're gonna say, what your alternatives are and when you plan to be back. So they'll go to that cross country and then they'll come back, and then they say, well, you got eight more hours of solo to fill up. Now what are you gonna do? And honestly, the best thing they can do is come out and do hover practice.

Yeah.

Build those skills, and they'll come and, you know, maybe 20 minutes, 45 minutes on the morning on the way to work or on the way home, come take the helicopter, hover around the ramp, put it away.

Yep.

And yeah, the more startups and shutdowns and pickups and set downs and shorter sessions, repeated sessions, the better you get at it. And every day they come. There's a different wind blowing, so is a different appreciation for what the weather is doing. Plus, if they're doing it as a solo, nobody's watching them and judging them either. It's a great confidence booster.

I can't agree more with Gavin's statements because everything he's saying is so true. As you use this hovering square pattern, the more you do it, the better you'll get. You're going in each of the wind directions, hovering in all those directions, picking up and setting down with the wind off the different sides. And the skill level is just when you see students, they start off really frustrated when you first start teaching them, but you want to show this to them early on before they're very good at hovering. And then every so often bring it back and reintroduce it again. And then they see their own progress. And as Gavin stated, it's great to go out and use during your solo time. It's just such a big confidence builder. I absolutely love this method. While we work our way around the rest of the pattern, I want to tell you about Helicopter on land ground school and specifically our Robinson R44 specific section. We have those inside helicopter line ground school. We have R22 and R44 specific section, instrument specific section. And this video you see right here is a another new video. We've uploaded like 13 new videos to the R44 section just in the last few days. This is another one going into the R44 section. I can't think straight up aviation enough in Fort Myers, Florida and Gavin going out with me and doing my flight review and getting me current R44 again. I then hung around and flew with five different Hogs members in Florida. Three of them, four of them right there is straight up. It was awesome. The first day with Gavin was my flight review and then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday I flew with HOGS members. We flew up to a taco Tuesday which was a blast. Went somewhere for lunch every day and went out and filmed a bunch of maneuvers. And I'm excited to go back as soon as I get done finishing up editing all this fresh content I have. Now I'm going back for another round of videos. So go check out helicopter online ground school. We'll put a link down below helicopterground.com that link will be in the description box. And we have a 30 day money back, no hassle guarantee on all of our courses. Burden is on us to provide you the value so there's no risk to you. Clear on the right. That'll take us back over to our Spot. I suppose I should actually be avoiding those ropes.

They're weighted ropes. They won't pick up. Yeah, we land here all the time. They don't have a fly up. But good point, though. But these particular ones are weighted, so they will never fly up.

Okay, that's cool. All right, well, I think I'm ready to park.

Sounds good.

I know. She is getting tired too. Yeah. All right.

Okay, so first two lines of the shutdown checklist we memorize. Roll the throttle down to idle and use the index finger to turn off the governor. Use that same left hand to go back and put the friction on the collective. And the same left hand comes forward to put the friction on the cyclic. All right. And then we pull the checklist. So collective down. RPMs 60 to 70. Let it cool down. Friction on. Cyclic and pedals neutral. Friction on. We've done those two lines already. And now what we're waiting for is the cylinder head temperature to drop. We can keep the engine a little bit above idle. We can keep it in 60 to 70% to bring a little bit more cooling air in. And we're looking for the cylinder head temperature here for the needle to come down below the 350. Little white mark in the middle there. Depending how hot it is outside, depends how long it's going to take for cooling. And then once that needle is starting to come south of the 350, which it kind of is right now, can close the throttle all the way to idle. So make sure that comes up to the idle stop and then disengage. The clutch cover comes up and then the toggle switch. I'm going to set a timer down here. We're looking for about 30 seconds to release the tension from the belts. And then we'll pull the mixture to cut the engine.

Do you find yourself where, you know, like, to. To this day has been awesome, but, like, I'm starting to now feel kind of tired.

Yep.

Like an hour from now. Like, sit down and eat.

Yeah, I, I.

Do you ever find yourself where you go, damn, I'm freaking tired? Yeah, I know. That's the way I'm gonna Bill.

Yep.

Like, we sat down and have lunch. I fell great. I'm like, oh, man. But just coming back here and doing this once we were up, I'm like, you know what? I feel it right now. I'm tired. Brains not working as well as I'd like it.

To pull the mixture now. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. A little bit of dehydration there. A little bit of, you know, long Travel day yesterday. And yeah, it all. It all gets in there.

I mean, I'm very happy.

And then, you know, there's the talking and the concentrating and all that stuff. It all takes a little bit out of you right through the day, so. Yeah, absolutely.

I've always told people, it's like sometimes I think the instructor is more tired than the student.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Especially if you don't do any flying. Like if the students are flying all the time and you're not demonstrating, you know, like you're doing stuff. You sat here a lot of the time. Right. So waiting for the 30 seconds and then we can pull the rotor brake up above our heads here, waiting for the clutch light to fully go out, which is just done. And we'll stop those blades, Ac can go off.

I'd say you have some nice aircraft here. Yeah. Is the other one similar to this one?

Yeah, the other one. This is a 2006. That one's a 2002, I think, actually. But they both been recently overhauled. And then everything off.

All right, since you all been good and hung around so long, or answer some more questions. And then we're going to give away Pro Pilot, 12 months. Only 12 months, not unlimited 12 months. Pro Pilot. So you get all the courses for one year. So Copter Bob jumped in there and helped with the question on knowing where the wind is. And some other ideas would be. Always look for. Look for factories nearby. If you're in an urban area, a factory, smokestacks always have smoke coming out. Fires. Usually somebody has a fire, they're burning stuff in a yard or something like that. Flags. There's lots of flags around. Restaurants usually have flags, a lot of them. Anytime you're near area ripples, going across a pond or a lake, look for those. All indications of where the wind is at. Good question, though. And a good helicopter person should always be watching for the wind. What else you got, Lindsey?

The rope on the tarmac, is that.

Oh, that's a good question. On that video. You're right.

Yeah.

It was a risk after the fact. Sure. Could be. Be. I mean, hell, anything could be a risk. Right. But yeah, they had a lot of ropes on that ramp and. Sure. Yeah. If you weren't being careful, could a rope somehow get tied up in a skid and cause a problem? I would think, absolutely. I would always think of everything as being a danger. You know, I taught my daughter how to drive, and she said, dad, all you do is point out everything bad that can happen. And I go, I know it's because I'm helicopter instructor.

Right?

That's what I do. So I get paid to do constantly point out what could be a problem, what bad could happen, what could cause a problem. So yes, absolutely. Being vigilant, you know, and helicopters, you got to use some common sense. Like when you go, for example, when you go hovering up to a gas pump, especially at a place that you don't know or you don't go frequently, a lot of times they'll leave ladders standing up beside a gas pump. You'll knock ladders up over somebody doesn't have their airplane properly tied down, you'll blow an airplane across the ramp, you know, it'll start rolling. So a lot of care in a helicopter near the surface, as in, in the up in the air. When you're move doing ground operations, you got to be looking out for anything and everything that can happen when you're near the ground. For sure, 100%. Do us a favor, subscribe to the channel. We're going to wrap it up because it's almost five o'. Clock. We've been live almost four hours and we pulled this right out of the rabbit's hat.

We just.

I came in this morning, I go, let's go live. Let's pick some videos. And we've enjoyed this. We've had a good time. Lindsay says I haven't had a chance to read all comments and I missed most of them over the last 12, 14 days. But she said people are really enjoying what we've done. And especially today just being kind of just threw it together. I want to do another one where we talk specifically about maneuvers and show a bunch of flying videos. And I got some other ideas that just some. I've been watching a lot of other people and watching a lot of live presentations and seeing what people are doing out there. And I've just got some ideas kicking around and this has been fun. So yes, we are going to do some more after the first of the year. I might, if I'm feel, you know, energetic tomorrow, I might come in the afternoon tomorrow, maybe do something just for fun.

Are we working tomorrow?

Well, the plan's not to work, but I don't know.

Everybody in chat tell Kenny I deserve a month's vacation of paid leave.

They all deserve it.

I deserve it. Everybody deserves it.

Every. Everybody's saying, oh, Kenny, tell Lindsay she deserves a month paid. I think you're making the that up. I'm pretty sure you're making that up. Month of paid vacation. Who the hell gets a Month of paid vacation.

Me if you grant it, negative, nada.

Not going to happen.

Wow.

Cuz I'm a slave driver. Got to pay the bills. Yeah. Sell ends tomorrow night. Selling Santa. 40, 40% off. And no if you don't know, we haven't mentioned this today. We have a 30 day money back, no hustle guarantee on our memberships. Burden is on us to provide you the value. So monthly memberships, you got 24 hour test flight where you get to see the whole course, not just a sample. So you got 24 hours to go and make an informed decision. Yeah, I think I want to keep this and use it month to month or it's not what I really look at. For right now, unsubscribe your build nothing. And then each 30 day has a 30 day money back guarantee. Right? So you got 29 days, not 42 days, but 29 days to value its training. We have a 30 day money back, no hassle guarantee again on our online digital products. I talked the other day about the helicopters and we're stepping up our policy on the helicopter and we've had a lot of cancellations, which is part of it, I get it. But it was like the overboard amount of cancellations and we spent a lot of time getting things ready. So not the same on our flying packages. If you want to fly, we really want serious inquiries and we're, we're having to institute no refunds on that. Within reason. What are you, what are you doing over there?

I have several people in chat telling you that I deserve a month pay. Thank you guys.

Well, good for them. I'm glad that they're, I'm glad they support you in your endeavor.

Thank you.

So we're stepping up with the policies on the flying portion just because we put a lot of time and effort in getting these ready and line up the examiner and line up Hauser to come down. So those 30 day money back is not on flying packages. Man, I'm about to the end of it. What else you got?

Oh, Heather deserves a month pay as well. Of course she does. I think all three of us really do. I say we just take a month's hiatus and we just get paid doing nothing.

Well, you know, it sounds wonderful, doesn't it?

Well, just, you know, we'll just take a vacation. Let's go to Hawaii or Florida or somewhere where we can avoid this cold, cold weather that's coming up these next couple of weeks.

Yeah, well, you know what they say, Wish in one hand and shit in the other. See which One fills up the quickest.

Thanks, Kenny.

Nope.

Just a lot of people asking if they have previously won if they are eligible to win the pro pilot course. Of course. Though if you have previously won any of our free course giveaways these past 14 days, we do ask that you don't participate.

Yeah, I mean, if you've already won a course, then please let somebody else win the course. If you've got one free course, it's unfair to ask to try to win another free course. I think so, yeah. If you've already won. If you already won a free course, let others play. If you've won a book, that's fine, you can play. Play for the course. I don't have a problem with book or hoodie going for the course, that's fine. But if you've had. If you've already been granted a year access to a course, let other people play on the course. So let's go ahead and just give it away. We already said it, right? One year pro Pilot.

One year Pro Pilot.

So all the memberships and I'm going to make it pretty easy. I mean, you got to be a little familiar with what we do in order to win, but that's part of it. It's still pretty easy if you've been around any length of time. And what we do. What is the name of the course that we use to finish up your reading? It's where we help you out. You come up and we put together a checkride for you and finish it up. This will be quick. We've marketed this heavy enough over the last two years.

Oh, I don't know.

Shouldn't take long. Somebody come up with three terms. Three words and spleet, please, please spell correctly. I always say this three words spell correctly the name of our course and they cannot. Well, course is in the name. So you got the third letter or the third term. Blank, blank course. I already said course. Yeah, blank, blank course. So you need. But you got to spell it all out. Blank, blank and spelled it course.

Okay.

Full name.

Okay, I got it. We got a winner. Final approach course from mom. Shep flies.

That sounds like a different id.

It does.

Sounds like a newbie.

Absolutely. She. They have been in chat all day today with us. So thank you for participating. Thank you for winning. I think you'll find it quite funny some of these names people have come up with as to what we call our final approach course.

I want to know.

Pro pilot, Final flight test preparation. Kenny's get her done course. But of course, of course. It is.

That's cool though. It is Kenny's get her done course.

Our FAC is our final approach course. So congratulations.

That's too funny. All right, subscribe so you can come back and pick up on some other events. When we got stuff coming out. We've got some videos that are going to come out, excerpts from the last 14 days. We've picking like some people have asked some really, really good questions that were very common that people asked almost every day. So Lindsay's going through and picking out, you know, really good questions and then our answers is a series of short videos. We're going to let those start coming out next week or after the first of the year and we're gonna plan some more live stuff and do some more stuff. It's been fun. So I don't know what to say other than hogs pays me hogspaysme.com our affiliate program Heather just told me we've been pushing this hard for 14 days and only in the last how many months Heather, since like October, only two people have signed up to be a fan affiliates and we've been talking about this heavy and I'm like it's free money. It's money that all you have to do is just sign up for an affiliate, take the link and then go hey student, I you want some help with ground? Go sign up here. Hogs pays me. Here's the link. Take your link, give it to them and you're going to get money sent to your PayPal. Two people since October. I I thought that economy was tough and people were hurting for money.

Free money.

Become an affiliate hogspaysme.com that link is down below. Don't forget about our clone. Ask Hogs.com don't forget to send us in some pictures of your check rides. We need some fresh ones. We'll send you in the no go button and man, that's all I got. Really.

No private pilot or privateblueprint.com nothing private pilot blueprint.

This is down below free PDF top 10 checkride taps. That's down below free PDF sale ends tomorrow night.

Yep. Here's a question about the sale. So we have a 40% off sale. It is not 50% off but if somebody buys a monthly with the coupon code does that 40%? Is that applied to every month?

Yes. And we haven't always. Sometimes we just make it for just the first month and then it reverts to the normal price. No, the monthly for as long as you keep it. So as long as you successfully keep it. It's 40% off and you unsubscribe. And then when you go to come back, then you'll come back at full price, or you'd have to pick up the next sell that comes along. But yes, if you buy before tomorrow night, private pilot, monthly, for example, night 90% or 90%. Whoops, sorry. 40% off the 97amonth. So actually, pretty smoking hot deal considering. Oh, an hour of flight training in a helicopter, instructor helicopter cost you 3, 4, 500 bucks an hour just to go get flight training. If you go pay for ground school, you're paying 50 bucks an hour or 75 bucks an hour. You got access to all those videos for a course for a month. For.

Can you pause a course payment? Can you pause on a course?

Okay, you can. We have a pause option.

They just have to reach out to.

Heather, but they can't do it themselves. All right, so you got to reach out to Heather to pause. So, yes, you could pause. You could sign up with a discount. You could pause. You have to email in, ask for the pause. We can pause the count. It'll stop your access, but it'll stop billing. And then when you want to be resume, you have to contact Heather again, and you could resume. That's something that we didn't always have. That's an option that was created in the. Yeah, that's a fairly new option that we didn't have. And there's a lot of options that we should. After the first year, we'll talk about some new stuff because we haven't completely kept up with all the new stuff available to us because we've been so busy. All right, I guess that's. Yes.

Peace.

Peace out. See you next video. 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. Helicopter.