Helicopter Accident Review from Live Training Tuesday
Kenny Keller, Gary, and Chris Hauser break down a viral R44 accident video and what went wrong. They walk through hover checks, passenger briefings, and ground crew procedures, then show how their own operations handle the same scenario safely. The gap between the accident and the safer version comes down to pressure to cut corners.
Chapters
Hello gary here@hospitalopterground.com with Chris Hauser and today we're going to cover air aeronautical decision making. Chris has actually got some experience with flight tours, festival related things and he's going to touch on some of the precautions they took to make that work without incident. Anything?
No. You're going to do your ADM presentation and then Kenny's gonna join me and we're gonna talk about, we're gonna review a video that's been out there on Facebook. We're gonna look at that and then we're gonna talk about how we do it here and how we thing try to make things as safe as possible. Anything.
Is there any comments Courtney, about the audio?
Everyone says it's loud and clear.
Oh good.
No technical difficulties so far. Thanks for tuning in for live Tuesday. Awesome to be here Kenny.
Alright, thanks everybody for being here. I'm going to keep it short, I always talk too much. I'm going to go to Courtney just a second so you can see Courtney real quick. Go ahead and start typing in your questions. As we're going through Gary's presentation, Courtney's going to keep track of them and then we'll get to questions at the end of Gary's presentation. Anything on the ADM before Chris and I jump up there and do our deal. So let's go just for fun over to Courtney so she can wave at the camera. Hi. Alright, so she'll be there taking your questions. As always, let us know who you are, where you are, where you're from. If you're brand new, we'll recognize your name. If you've been here before, we appreciate you all being here. So I'm gonna get Gary's camera up and ready to go. So here we go with gary's presentation on ADM aeronautical decision making.
Welcome back. It's gary@helopterground.com and I will be going through a presentation on aeronautical decision. This is all information that you will need to know for your written test and also for your checkride day and to keep you safe as a pilot. Some of the information we'll be talking about is boring and tedious but Kenny promises to spruce it up with some examples, some videos to really bring this home to real world application. So let's go through the PowerPoint real quick. Aeronautical decision making occurs before, during and after the flight. We have some acronyms we're going to throw at you today. The first being pave Pilot, Aircraft Environment, External pressure. And we will break each of these categories down but this is your primary checklist. Pilot the first part of PAVE is illness. Medication, Stress, Alcohol, Fatigue, Emotion. So the first part of PAVE is the pilot and we have another acronym that most of you have heard or need to commit to memory if you haven't. I'm safe. Illness. Need to consider if we have anything going on with us that makes us an unsafe pilot. Medication. A lot of medications have side effects. Some medications say do not operate heavy machinery. Some medications are over the counter and just cause us to be drowsy and we wouldn't be alert. Pilots Stress things in our life that would cause us to be stressed and affect our decision making capability. Alcohol. We do not want to operate an aircraft under the influence of alcohol. The regulations in Part 91 say 0.04 blood alcohol content or 8 hours within consumption of alcohol. Fatigue need to have our proper rest so we can make good decisions as pilots. We need to make sure that our emotions are in check. Make sure that we are not trying to fly while we are preoccupied with the facet of emotions that can affect us due to things in our personal life or our work environment. Aircraft. Second part of pave make sure that the aircraft is maintained in airworthy condition. Make sure it has all the inspections that's needed pre flighted properly. Adequate fuel. Know the POH limitations, weights and balance. So you're going to look through the maintenance manuals if you're not flying this aircraft every day and make sure that it has its annual inspection. Make sure it has the hundred hour. Make sure the transponder and altimeter are certified. Make sure all airworthiness directives are adhered to. Remember that it is the aircraft owner operators responsibility to maintain the aircraft in airworthy condition and it is the pilot's responsibility to make sure that the aircraft is good to fly for the day. Make sure you do that proper pre flight, no shortcuts. Make sure that you check for adequate fuel. Make sure that you have that POH handy and that you're familiar with it. Weights and balance limitations, so forth. The V in PAVE is for environment. So we're talking about things here including weather, surroundings, terrain. And remember that helicopters and we'll get into this with some of the things Kenny's going to introduce with the videos. Your surroundings might not be at an airport. You might be doing an off airport landing. So you have to worry about people, obstacles, mechanical, turbulence, the terrain, the forced landing areas, the whole facet of things you need to consider about confined area and off airport landings that could put you in danger. Weather is a big one. Not Just good VFR weather at the takeoff airport. But throughout the day, what you're going to run into if you're on a cross country. Make sure that you have good weather ahead of you and make good weather decisions. It doesn't pay to fly when it's questionable. External Pressure do not let external pressure cause you to ignore risk. Many times in the work environment there may be, or it could be in your own personal life. Being pressured to take a flight that you know is not smart. Whether the weather is not right, whether the load is a little heavy, whether the aircraft has a small problem that you're trying to overlook just to make somebody happy with a flight that had been planned. Do not let external pressure cause you to ignore risks. The risks are there. Admit them. Take the appropriate action. Crew Resource Management this is into PTS and definitely will be discussed. Kind of a simple topic when you think about it. For single pilot operations, it's often called cockpit resource management. Have things stowed away. Have radio frequency set. Have the POH and charts easy to get to access. Do not be afraid to use passengers to help with the workload. There are many things that a non pilot can help with like scanning the sky for collision avoidance, changing radio frequencies, operating the GPS, checking sectional charts, etc. It's easy to take a non pilot passenger and teach them how to operate that radio, how to change the GPS setting, how to change your frequencies for you. And scanning the sky is a huge task that can easily be divvied out to your passenger as well. Now we'll get into hazardous attitudes. Definitely on the written test and these make good sense too for safe piloting, of course. Anti Authority Follow the rules as your antidote. The rules apply to you. Impulsivity Plan do not make decisions hastily. Take time to plan. Think them through. Invulnerability Antidote it can happen to you as well. It can happen to anybody. Macho Taking chances is foolish as your antidote. Do not do things that you think you can do that you're going to get away with safely because it can happen to you. Taking chances is foolish. Resignation A person may think that they cannot make a difference. They cannot stand up to their boss and say it is not a good day to fly. You can make a difference. Stand up for what is right. We're going to talk about the decide Model D is for detecting the action necessary. E. Estimate the significance of the action. C. Choose a desired outcome. I Identify actions needed in order to achieve the chosen option. D. Do the necessary action to achieve the change and E evaluate the effects of the action. We'll go through situational awareness. Be aware of the situation you are in and imagine what could happen next. Be able to play out the possible scenarios. Be alert to everything around you. Know your options. Be able to predict what your options may lead to. Risk management is a great skill needed in this case since pilots are required to analyze how risky their actions can be. Choosing the pilot has to decide from his options which action will deliver a positive outcome. Pilots will need to reason why that option is the best act. Perform the chosen action in a timely manner. Evaluating the performance. This means recording your actions to see if the actions taken have been in accordance with rules and regulations. This allows the pilot to know if the action he or she has carried out was operationally correct and if there are or were further actions needed to be executed. Given that a complication is still present. What this means is simply you may have a report to file with your employer to justify your actions, to explain your actions, or possibly the FAA with an incident report, depending on what actions you took to keep yourself, your passengers, and the environment safe. So this covers everything that you should need to know on the topic of aeronautical decision making for the written test and for your checkride day. Hope it helps. And Kenny has some more entertaining things to move on to relating to aeronautical decision.
All right, little technical, technical issue there. Okay, so we're gonna go over to Courtney and see who's here, see who's commented what's going on. So, Courtney, we're going over to you now. Hello, Harvey. Good morning. Juanita and Greg and John Fuller and Harley. Hi, Taz and Rebecca from Orange county and James from Washington. That's all for now, Gary. Awesome. So Gary did a great job on his adm. Go ahead. And if you haven't asked a question yet, you're still welcome to put them in there and we'll get to the questions at the end. Chris and I are going to roll through this right now. We're going to share the laptop screen here in just a second. We're going to show you this video that was on the helicopter page and I shared it to all of our stuff. Pretty popular video going around us, this R44 accident. And we're just going to let you kind of watch. We're going to kind of talk through it if we have everything set correctly. And we'll just kind of talk about what we're seeing. But you'll see everything happens so quickly. There's a lot of chaos, a lot of things happening very, very Fast. And the thing that we preach over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Slow, smooth, methodical. Okay. And then there's the bad judgment chain. So you know, there's already people on the, on the Facebook going, oh, but it was. This was why the accident happened or that was why the accident happened. We're really going for here, we're looking kind of thinking about the bad judgment chain. You know, we know that an accident doesn't normally happen because of one reason. An accident happens because of a multitude of reasons that stack up together. So for the people that commented on, when I shared it, my response to you is I didn't say what caused the accident. I said, well, maybe if they had done a good two step process and if they had done a good hover pre takeoff check and taken their time, maybe, maybe this would not have happened. So we're going to let you see it so you can make your own decisions. And then we're going to show you some footage from Rockstar. Chris over here flying the R44, doing some helicopter rides from an event. And the people that were working with that day did a really good job at setting everything up, how they keep people back, how they keep control of everything. And also you'll see some footage of the Chris pickup set downs, him talking, taking the time to talk to the passengers once they're inside. Just a lot of good stuff that we think, things that should be. And of course some people are going to say, oh, but you know, we're commercial, we're making money. Well, that's the problem in this industry. It's about turning the almighty dollar to keep the blade spinning and safety falls behind. You know, sorry, that's reality, people. And that happens in news reporting, ems, helicopter rides across the board. It's always about those blades spinning. People get pushed, either they push themselves or whoever they're working for is pushing them. So we're gonna play this video from the helicopter page. Let's go ahead and share the screen, Gary. And we will roll this thing, see if I can start it back from the beginning. And let's blow it up here. And so we'll just kind of go.
Ahead, Chris, take it back to the beginning so we can see the landing.
Okay, gonna back up screen.
Yeah.
So yeah, notice how fast he's coming in, twisting and turning as he's setting down. Guys already walking up there. Go ahead and make comments in the chat while you're watching. But this whole thing's chaotic. I mean, just from the very beginning and the first thing I saw that day, it's like, okay, who is who? You got people going everywhere. Who's a pilot, who is a passenger, who's escorting, who, who's your ground crew, who's your ground crew, who's involved with what here? It's pretty, just makes you wonder, okay, so you know something bad is going to happen. Of course the video is on Facebook and it's blowing up and people are talking and commenting and sharing. So, okay, apparently it's helicopter rides. Guy walks away, he's apparently part of the crew. And of course we're going to have the ultimate camera person here. That blows the last minute. But look at this takeoff. Look at that boom. Okay, so there goes the camera as always. Nobody ever captures an accident without turning the camera down to the ground. But okay, a lot of things going on. It's chaotic from the start. It's going really fast. There's people everywhere. That pickup, there was no two step process involved in that pickup whatsoever. That was yank it off the ground, turn, pull power and start to go. There was no hover pre takeoff check. You know, we in this industry, you got to do hover pre takeoff check. I flew EMS 5 years and they said, guys, we don't care if you got 2,000 hours, you got 10,000 hours. You do a hover pre takeoff check every time. And that's on an EMS mission. Okay? They're giving helicopter rides here. What do you think, Chris? What's your thoughts?
Well, make my disclaimer like I would in law enforcement. Every time I get a law enforcement question or, you know, when people of the public come up to me and say, well, this officer did this and my first thing is I wasn't there. Okay, you're seeing exactly what I'm seeing. I only know about this aircraft accident by reading the comments and watching the video. So I, you know, obviously this probably just occurred within the last week or so. It just got out on the Internet. So obviously the investigation is just in the beginning stages of it. So my disclaimer is I wasn't there. I wasn't the pilot. I don't know what's, what happened inside the cockpit. I don't know what his weight limits were. I can obviously see that there's four people in the aircraft. I can only give you what we've done here at Plymouth and with Kenny and what I was taught when I first watched this video. The first thing I thought was, man, he came in fast and then he sat down fast. I was taught from day one. In a helicopter, everything starts and ends in a hover. That's how I teach my students. That's how I do it. It's like Kenny just said, there was no hover there. He came right in. I think. Hell, I think he was doing a pedal turn with the skid on the ground. Yeah, I think when he landed, I think he had his left skid on the ground. I think when he took off, his left skid was on the ground. He was doing pedal turns on both of them. Which brings up the next point of it is, which way is the wind coming? I mean, he comes in, you know, he comes in from right to left and he leaves from left to right. So is he taking off in the wind or is he landing in the wind? Which way is it? I don't know. But yeah, just after reviewing this video, he was fast on the approach. He sat down quick. And then Kenny mentioned the ground crew. There's people everywhere. I mean, that's just a safety. That's just a hazard waiting to happen. A passenger walking into the tail rotor. I don't even know what to say here. At least the good thing here is that this is a learning experience and we can talk about it.
But.
Yeah, and then like you said, there was no pre takeoff. I don't even think the guy had time to talk to his passengers as we watch it here again, that he picks that sucker up and does a pedal turn. His skid's not even off the ground, and off he goes. Now, my personal opinion is all that is a contributing factor. I think what has come out is that something happened inside the cockpit where the passenger grabbed the controls or bumped the cyclic or did something. Which brings up another point. I'm assuming that you can't tell from the video. Maybe you can if you blow it up, but I'm assuming that the controls are removed, I think.
I don't know for sure.
And the Robinson Poh actually states in there that if the front passenger is not a rated pilot, that that cycle control's got to come out. So, you know, I don't think it's in there just by me looking at it. But you never know. I mean, so we're here today, you know, we're not here to poo poo the pilot or anything like that. We're just maybe out here to show you how this could have done, been better, and maybe avoided this.
Yeah. And I want to add to that, you know, good Chris's good disclaimer, and mine too. And I said in the beginning and I'm still, you know, I'm picking apart what's going on, but sure I am. I want to say every time I see a helicopter accident video, it makes me cringe, okay? My heart immediately sinks. I never want to see helicopters crash. I never want to see anybody hurt. I've been through one. I know what it's like.
I've been through one, he's been through.
One, Gary's been through one. We're now all, you know, we've all been there. We've all been through some type of a helicopter accident where an aircraft has been virtually pretty much destroyed or close to being destroyed, because we're human beings and we're pilots and we do dumb stuff. And when Chris was talking, I made a thought. I did some rides in R44 for a private owner at a private event one day, and I didn't take out the other part of the cyclic. And I put that video in grout school. And a member called me out on it, said, hey, Kenny, why did you have that? Why was that control in there that day? And I've left that video in ground school. And I said, you got me. Thanks for pointing that out. And you're right. I should have removed the cyclic. And I didn't because it was. I was in a hurry. I was at a private event. I was the owner's helicopter, and I didn't have the brains to go, hey, you know what? Today I need to take this out. So we do stupid stuff sometimes. We do stuff either. It's not normally malicious, but it's. We don't think about doing something. So Kris is right. If you're giving rides, those controls need to be out of there. So I want to say it looks like everybody's okay, and I'm glad they're okay. And everybody thinks I'm just picking on these guys. I'm not. But it's blowing up on Facebook, so why not talk about what happened? And when I first saw it, my instinct was, wow, chaos. Everything happened so fast. And again, the bad judgment chain, when you think about it, I mean.
Well, I think what we're going to. You're talking about. It's the chain of events. It's not one thing that led. You know, we're going to see some video here of the events that we. When we gave rides, what, a year or so ago. And, you know, if he would have just taken five seconds to actually, you know, talk to his passengers and said, hey, here's what's going to happen. Don't touch this don't touch that. As he's bringing the aircraft to the two step process of bringing it up off the ground and then slowly came to a hover and then did his pedal turn. That happens almost immediately when he takes off. So five seconds into the flight. So if he would have. Just think of the first five seconds if he's trying to lift off and then come to a hover, that would have happened right there as you're hovering and maybe the. Maybe it would have been different, maybe not. I don't know. But, you know, it seems like a contributing factor to this is him being in a hurry. Right?
I agree. I agree totally. So the video we're gonna roll for you I edited and only I make that point is I just. We have a bunch of video and I just went through and really tried to pick the cool. Not cool clips, but clips really highlighting what we've just talked about. Plus one cool shot of Chris flying by the moon. That one I left in there just because it's. And we're going to make some pictures.
I mean, you edited it for time frame, but this is exactly. I mean, this is an R44 giving rights. Obviously we're a business, we want to try to make money, but you can see that we've taken all the precautions necessary. If something happened, we could at least say to the feds, we did everything in our power to avoid. This is our setup. This is what we did. I mean, you know, we had ground crew there that were clearly visible. They were responsible for doing part of the passenger briefing. Of course, when they got in the aircraft, I said something to them. You know, I mean, it's just. But as you can see, I'm sure these people in Brazil were trying to make money or doing whatever, but we were doing the same thing, but we just had our operation a little bit differently.
You're right. We're all cops here. Totality of the circumstance is what they toss at the police academy. And if the FAA showed up in an accident, like from the video we're going to show you, they would immediately go. If they saw pictures or they were there and they're going, wow, hey, looks like. Looks like you guys were doing it, right? Okay. They're still going to dig to find out what happened, but you're less likely to be blamed and. Or sued if you were at least taking all the precautions. So should we go ahead and roll that now? We're going to. We'll keep talking while that rolls. So we're going to watch the video over there. On the screen. If we got this all set up.
It.
Without us even talking. It's way up. There could just be noise. Anybody comment in chat?
I think that's the helicopter because of the green lights going on.
So now we're there in there. Did you take off the hell? Because I'm at helicopter now, which is probably loud. Check the file and make sure that the audio for the file's been unchecked. There we go. All good. All right. And maybe slide that little thing down the right too. That'll help. There you go. Awesome. All right, so we'll let this video roll and I'll just kind of talk through it because I know when I was editing it, I'm trying to show you the different things like, okay, nice pickup. Taking a sign, taking off. Let's see what comes up next. We have footage of taking off. We have footage of Chris landing. And we have footage of the people being escorted up to the helicopter. Escorted away from the helicopter. There's the hover pre takeoff check. That's what I'm talking about. Even if it's 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, you're looking over everything. Make sure your temperatures and pressures are in, agreeing, you've got fuel, everything is ready to go. You're giving that engine time to spit, sputter, puke. Here comes an approach I threw this into just because I think it's kind of cool with the lights. Okay. Watch how Chris sits down nice and slow, keeping the nose straight and just easing it down onto the ground. Okay? That's how every step down should be. That's how. If you're flying EMS in a 135 operation, you land at a scene. That's how you land. So there goes one of the safety people. Even has a step that he can use. You can see he was wearing an orange cone. Now here, Chris is taking the time to talk to his passengers. He doesn't just yank the helicopter off the ground. He's talking to him. Hey, how you guys doing? You got your seatbelts on? You know, he's probably saying, keep your hands off the controls. If anytime you have a problem, please let me know and we can land. Going through all those things that you need to brief your passengers on about the safety. And there's a couple more shots, different passengers, different times. But I just really want to stress that it's not slam the doors in and take off in the helicopter. This is the way you operate a helicopter rides. This is the way you should operate a 135 EMS. This is how you operate news reporting. You have to go slow and you have to, you know, avoid fact to the money. And we know that. Okay, so nice pickup. Again, hover pre takeoff check. He picks up, takes a few seconds and I threw that one in because another just pretty shot in the sunset flying away. There's the moon in the background. Alright, let's have fun. Look at this shot I showed Chris that. He's like, oh man, can I picture that? I'm like, absolutely. We'll clip some shots that are there. That's a beautiful shot. R44 flying by the moon. Very nice. So let's see what else we got. Should come on up next. All right, here you go. It's clearly who is who Orange. We know who the safety people are. Look at the orange cones. Okay. The orange cones are the point that you don't go past this point until you're escorted. Okay. I want him to notice hydration. Okay. He has controls locked and he has it at idle, by the way. So his left hand's off the collector because he's at an idle.
Also using my knees and he's using.
His knees but he's hydrating. Okay. Big problem with pilots, helicopter pilots, dehydration. FAA's been pushing that for quite some time. See how everybody's over there, they got got yellow tape, all the cars are parked behind a fence. You're escorting people over. There's three people with three passengers. And I know some people are going to say, oh, but that's just unrealistic. When we're out making money, we can't have three people there. Well, alright, what's the life worth? You know, what happens if you can.
Do it, you know, just a little bit, you know, you got to explain to them, okay, there's only one of me. So when I walk all three of you out there, I want all three of you to stand in front of the helicopter and then I'll place each one of you in the seat.
Yep.
So I think it can be done. It's just being, you know. Yeah, I mean we were just lucky that day and we had plenty of people for help and whatever, but. And that was a hot day too. I think I drank a lot of water that day.
Well, you were doing the fly in and that was not my operation. But he did the army aircraft asked my advice ahead of time and I gave him advice on how I thought they should do it and what they could do to be safe. Yeah, I think he did a great job. He did an excellent job. He Even went, you know, maybe above and beyond. He did a great job at just setting everything up. There goes again, Chris taking off. The noses aren't clear down to the ground with the tail, you know, 20ft in the air. He's, you know, done this, doing this pre technical chap. Now look, he's making a quick right hand turn, looking outside, checking for traffic back outside. And now he starts his takeoff forward. Okay, that's the way you're supposed to do it.
That's exactly. Because the Runway is just behind us.
Exactly.
And I can't see the final approach for Runway 10. So I did a little right pedal turn there, make sure everybody's clear on final.
Yep.
And then off we go.
Okay, somebody's coming in that's not talking on the radio. Another shot just coming around here. We'll see what we have coming up next. Again, I'm going to say it again. Falls back to money. So when he lands, okay, he's approaching a spot. Nice and slow, keeping the nose straight. Everything ends with a hover. Everything starts with a hover. Everything ends with a hover. You went out flying EMS for five years. That's the way they wanted it done. The other pilots weren't doing it. And the medical crew going, well, how come Kenny hovers every time he takes off? Well, somebody had to step in and said, well, because Kenny's doing what he's supposed to be doing, the other guys are just yanking it off the ground and going. They wanted us to have a pre takeoff check every time they wanted to hover before we set it down. So again, there's your cones. Orange vest escorting the next group up. Two orange vests, two riders. And I know one of these clips I noticed where the guy in the orange is making sure the guy doesn't even start to go towards the tailwater. Maybe this is the one. He's always making sure he's staying behind the guy, guys. So if you start to walk the wrong direction, he can lasso in very quickly, get everybody in, they walk away. And again, you'll see Chris take his time, talk to the passengers, pre lift off check, get ready to go. I think that's a lot of the basics. I mean, it's. I can't think of anything else to really add in there. I don't know if Gary wants to throw anything in or not. We can go to your camera if you want to have anything in this, Jerry.
But.
But on YouTube. Chris, you want to add anything else, but we're hitting, you know, two step process, hover pre takeoff checks. Going slow, being careful, having help setting up cones. Who is. Who. Who's part of the, you know, who's part of the operation, who's not. I mean, there's just. There's so many things to talk about, and we could keep going forever. It's 133, so we should probably go ahead, Chris.
Well, I think it just comes down to, you know, and by all means, I'm not perfect.
None of us are. We all do.
I've made my mistakes. That's how we. That's how we learn. But, you know, this is.
Learn to tell again.
Yeah.
And check it for traffic.
And this is just one of those things. And we made money that weekend. We did it all weekend, and we made money. And look how fast we were. You know, fast, smooth. That's. Look, and I wanted to out point, point out, he mentioned this earlier. You see the yellow tape? There's only one way in and one way out to get to that aircraft from right there. So, you know, just another safety barrier. But again, like I said, I'm not here to bad mouth that guy. I'm glad it all worked out that everybody was not injured and everything, but there's clearly. I mean, I think we've shown that as an example of what not to do. Yeah.
Let's talk about the money thing for just a second. There was an operator that the year before this, did these rides at this event. He was charging $20 an hour ahead. $20 a person. Okay. And listen to this story. For 20 years, we did them out of the airport. This guy says, oh, I want to do him from the festival, you know, half a million people. Can we fly in and out of the softball field or baseball field? He gets approval. The entire weekend, everybody's complaining about their short ride. For 20 bucks, it's too slow. And I'm there. I watched it for like five minutes. And I like my daughter's everything. I'm going, gloria, don't even think about going for a ride in that. And my friends asked me about it. I'm like, I wouldn't get in with the guy. He's taken off to the limits of the helicopter. Every time he comes in and goes out of that little field surrounded by trees, hundreds of thousands of people every. Everywhere, nowhere to go.
It was a max performance takeoff each time, every time, find area, take landing.
Each time, going to the limit every time. Coming out of there, there was no place to go, no place to go. Coming in steep, ran hard all weekend. End up on the weekend. Had a problem for the weekend was over. Aircraft got left in the, in there because they had some kind of problem. Couldn't even fly it out. And then later that week, before they could remove it, tractor goes by Moen destroys, rips off the vertical stabilizer.
Yeah. Put a nice little ding in under.
Couple hundred thousand dollars probably in damage lawsuits. They should have never been doing it there. And so here's the key. The event that you guys that we just showed you. So that's the next year. And that owner, I said, well, what about pricing, Kenny? What do you think? And I said, hey, that guy last year was charged 20 bucks a ride. But people were complaining, they weren't happy. The pilots pushing himself at 20 bucks a ride. You know, you got to go, you got to go, you got to go, you got to go. And if I remember right, the owner for the one we're, the video we showed you, he doubled that to 40 or 45, did he not?
I think we did 30.
30.
I think we did 30 or 35 a person.
Okay.
Is what we did.
He did raise it up. And how many people complained?
None.
None. Out of three day festival or four day festival flying all weekend. Chris flew almost the whole thing.
And on top of that, we had repeats. We had people come back, repeat customers coming back, third trip.
And tell our viewers what the complaints you were hearing, because I'm saying it thirdhand. What were people telling you about the rides the previous year?
Oh, I had passengers in there that were telling me, oh, I went last year and it was too short. And that was the main thing, it was too short. So they said, yes, we were a little bit more, but we were giving them a better ride. But that was the main complaint, that it was too short. And yeah, and this is what my second or third time doing it and always done it out of the airport and never had. We've had a line each time. So doing it where the festival actually was was not beneficial for anybody. It actually irritated a lot of people. But anyway, that's different story.
But well. And there's nothing wrong with the word profit. One of the gurus I've flown with in the industry over the years that's taught me so much. He always preaches there's nothing wrong with profit, you know, and every time he heard of what I would charge for something, he's always like, you're crazy. You know what? You got to have your rates up there where they belong. And there's an example where they raised the rates. People were happy. They didn't complain. So making a cheap rate to fly like a crazy man is probably not the answer.
Well, we all know that.
Again, this is my opinion, but helicopters.
Are expensive, and people, a lot of people don't understand that. So you have to explain to them why. Why it's so expensive. You know, I just had a guy a month or so ago wanting a ride, and when I told him what it was going to cost him, he couldn't believe it because he was used to airplane, right? And I said, well, this is why helicopters are much more expensive and whatever. But, yeah, it's a business. We all want to make money when we own the business or working for a business or whatever, but you can't look at the FAA and say, well, I made $1,000 a day, but, yeah, you wrecked an aircraft and now you're under investigation for, you know, yeah, having safety violations or whatever. But, you know, and again, it goes, you know, it's back to, you know, like I said, please don't think I'm the best or whatever. You know, my disclaimer, I wasn't there. I don't know what the pilot was thinking. I don't know anything. I don't know the wind factors. I don't know the environment. I don't know what his fuel load was. I don't know the weight of the passengers. All I know is what I saw in the video and hopefully. But as you can see, we showed you another video that we were doing the same exact thing, giving rides in an R44, trying to make a little money, and how the two things were totally different.
Here's a good one. Do you have the people on the ground calculate the passenger weight balance before loading them in? Okay, great question. And I want to go ahead and interject what I was told by the faa. I had this discussion when I got my loa many years ago to go my first helicopter event. Here's a discussion with the local FAA official from the local Fitzdale talking about helicopter rides. You have to have an loa. And he talked about weight and balance. And he said, technically, technically, you. You need a weight and balance for every single time that you go up and go around the pattern and come back in. He said, now that's technically, at minimum, we want to see you do a weight and balance for the day. You know, for your zero fuel, empty fuel with your passengers, your light load, your heavy load, at least have one figured for the day. So straight from the faa, you should do it every single time in a helicopter. I'd event who is going to do that? Are they going to sit there and recalculate every single time? I guess it in reality is kind of unreasonable. If you know the machine, you know its limits, you get used to it. But technically that's how it should happen. So the advice I got from this official from the FAA was at least have your performance planning done for that day for the temperatures you're going to be flying with, the weight you're going to be flying with, the amount of fuel you're going to have on board, low to high, your passengers, low to high, and have those scenarios with you. Because if we show up, we're going to want to see that they're not going to. If they walk up and you go, oh, well, I just didn't do weight balance because I do rides all weekend. I know my machine. That's not going to fly with the faa, that's not going to fly. Want to add anything to that?
Just adding to that as the picnic you got to look at. You know, your ground crew may not know everything about the helicopter or the weight and balance per se, or whatever. And you have to as pic, you have to just put your foot down, basically, and say yes or no on the passenger. There have been times where, you know, okay, so the R44, it's three passengers, okay, you know that we were running minimum fuel. We were, you know, probably 8 or 10 gallons of what we had in there, maybe even less. So I knew what the weight limits were. But you have to look at them and say, if they bring out three relatively large people, you just have to say, no, I'll take two of you this time. And the other one can go with someone that's smaller or even, you know, I've even had this where I've actually had to turn people away just because, listen, the aircraft's weight limit says this and I. I'm sorry, but you can't go. You're just too big. But you have to do it nicely, obviously. But you just have to say that I can't. So, no, Kenny's right. Technically, you should by the faa, do it each time.
Do we?
No, but we also figure something in the morning, figure something, full fuel. And then if you average 150 to 200 pounds per person and with 8 gallons of fuel on there, then, you know, you'll know what you are. But yeah, I think the main priority is you have to be strong enough to say, no, I can't take you. And this is why. Or if your ground crew comes out with three 250 pound people. You got to be like, nah, I can't do all three of you at the same time. You just gotta. I mean, it just has to be.
So he just covered that. And that's the hard thing over the years. It's very hard to turn people down. You don't want to embarrass people. This is a rough, this is a rough part for the people that are helping you because you can train them and say, okay, this is the approximate way to people. You got to kind of guess if you get two people that are heavier or three people that are heavier, you might have to say, you know, it's hard to do that. So Chris covered it basically, and I just want to reiterate it. It's very hard. And then as the pilot, sometimes they're bringing people where, you know, it's too much and you gotta go, you know, it's. That's a tough one. So, you know, it's nice to have something made up at your event for helicopter rides, what the maximum weight is, because that also is tough when somebody shows up and they can't even go because they're too heavy by the limit of your aircraft. And they'll be up, you know, and they'll look at you and you just go. And you can refer to that and say, I'm sorry, but there's a seat limit by the manufacturer. We're not allowed to let you on board. And that's not easy to do. And that's hard. You don't want to be mean to people. That's a tough part of the helicopter ride thing. So train your people the best they can and try to ask them to be very strict about not overloading you. Because I've done it where they bring out more, you know, the low payload. Payload. I hate saying it that way, but I know it's going to be heavy, low.
It's all in EMS, right, when they say, oh yeah, patients, 200 pounds. And when they wheel the patient out, they're really a 300 pound. And you're like, what?
You know, all the time. And this was common in the EC135. We would go somewhere, they said, 200 pound patient. You get there, oh, hey, guess What? The patient's 400 and you have a certain amount of fuel on board. You go on a hot day in an EC135, you go to get out of the area and you can't get out. So what do we do in an EC135? Set it back down. Burn off fuel for two or three or four or five minutes. I tried again and usually it took us sometimes as much as 15 minutes, but sometimes we would have to sit and burn off fuel in order to get out of there. And yes, we had a drop box or a drop bag or they had a basket in the back that we could quickly recalculate our weight and balance. If you say, okay, we know we're heavy, can you drop off our. Whatever we called it, you could quickly on your PDF or whatever you called that little thing, hit the schedule, dropping that extra load. It's like stuff that EMS carry that they could kind of live without and the firemen or police will take care of getting it to you later. So we even have scenario like, okay, we're heavier than we thought, it's hotter than we thought. Let's drop that, reconfigure weight and balance before we take off and then have to burn off fuel before you could get out. So let's finish up questions. We're at one. We want to get it out of here pretty quick because we're going to try to start keeping these in an hour because the discs they go on too long. So sometimes Might the front seat passenger have grabbed the cyclic post could be reference that accident.
Reading through the comments, I don't know. You know, just from reading through the comments, it looks like that the cause is going to be that the passenger maybe have dropped his cell phone and bent over to grab it, not and then hitting the cyclic. Or I saw another comment that said, yes, the front passenger grabbed the cyclic for whatever reason. Now again, to me it appears that the left cyclic is out, but you can't really tell. So maybe he grabbed the T bar right in the center for whatever reason, I don't know. But again, going back to looking at it, that happened within the first five or ten seconds of the flight. And I think if he would have just taken the time to pick it up to hover and then did a pedal turn, that would have already happened before he actually took off and would have changed it. I don't know. I don't know.
Maybe not.
Maybe not.
You don't know.
Another question here and all three of us can answer this one. I have this out in video and I talk about it all the time. So I won't go on and on, on too long. And if these guys want to interject, they can. It's up to them. How does a pilot recover after having an accident or crash, whether it was pilot error or act of God and move on their career. I have a whole long hour of video on my whole accident on YouTube. Ground residents search for it. I will tell you this, I talked about it. I talked about it over and over and over. After the accident, immediately the attorneys, the helicopter manufacturer, they're all going, don't talk to anybody, don't say anything to anybody. Just, you know. And I'm like, are you kidding me? I'm at home, I can't work, I can't even pick up my one or two year old daughter. I can't pick up a gallon of milk. I'm home, I can't work, I can't do anything on medication. And they say don't talk to anybody. I talk to everybody, my family, my friends, anybody that wanted to call me on the phone. I sat for hours and I talked about it. And to this day I have never had a bad dream over it. Never. Not one bad dream. I have bad dreams about all kinds of other stuff, all kinds of things. So I have bad dreams, things wake me up, scare me in the middle of the night, but not that helicopter wreck. So I moved on. And it hurts, but you just, you muscle through it. So I'm going to keep it short on that one because I do talk about a lot. Do you want to share how you felt or what you did, how you got past it?
I went flying, I had my accident and we notified the faa, started doing all the proper stuff we needed to do and I went back flying the next day or two days later or whatever it was. I never had a fear of going back. You know, I, I don't know, I never had a bad dream about it either. I don't know, you just got to move forward. You got to, I guess you have to decide, do you want to, you know, move forward and keep flying or do you want to, do you want to just give it up? I mean if it's mechanical, I mean you could go out and drive your car and get in an accident, does that mean you're going to stop driving? I don't know.
I mean we shared one of our members accidents lately. He's a new member. First solo did AMIC rollover. We covered that in our live training Tuesday. He said go ahead and share it. He's still back to flying. He wants to do it. He got over it. Somebody wants, and I've heard this before, more than once, there are some companies that won't hire you unless you've had an accident. So believe it or not, people immediately think, oh, I've had an accident. My career is over. There are actually companies that will not hire you if you have a clean record. They will only hire you if you've had an accident because they know you've been through it. They know you know what it feels like. So you've been through that accident. And I know for flying ems, my crew members actually were somewhat comfortable with the fact that I'd been through an accident and that I openly talked about it because they felt it made them feel at ease that I'd been through a fairly, you know, a fairly horrific event and that I lived through it and I talked about it. That actually made them more at ease than it made them, you know, worry. Gary, you want to add anything to this? If you do, we can go to your camera. I'm putting you on the spot.
Well, I've had a couple incidents as everybody's known. I've shared about it and yeah, I just think to talk to other people about what happened to you might. Might help them. The incidents that I had were drivetrain related and so maybe it will help people to pre flight better what to look for to maybe prevent the same type of thing happening to them and the same type of aircraft.
Awesome. We got this. Access for 2015 investigation is done. And he reached T bar to hold on. Okay, cool. So again we both put our disclaimers. This was all about training. It's about, you know, what could be done. And what about. How about hydraulic failure? Well, that hydraulic failure, that doesn't have to be an accident. If you're flying R44, you can control that thing all the way to the ground. So we don't think it was good. Sounds like it's. But from everything that people are saying and by that comment sounds like that's probably what it was. Somebody grabbed a control, bumped control, whatever the case is. So I think we should probably wrap.
It up because number 150, I think that's, I think number four, the question are you going to watch the Brazil wedding flight in IMC with the R44? That video just came out what a month or two ago and I don't even know what to say about it. That was just. That is like everything that you're not supposed to do all wrapped up into one. I hated that people lost their lives in it. That was a complete accident. You shouldn't even label it an accident. That was just pure stupidity. He continued fly into imc. He knew better or should have known better. I don't know what the. I don't know if they were trying to get the passengers to this wedding or what the deal was. So he felt, you know, Gary talked about it earlier. He felt there that he had to get there. He felt peer pressure to get him there. He felt whatever. But it cost them their lives. And it's just. It's like Kenny said earlier, I cringe when I watched that one because that is just. There is. That was absolutely 100% avoidable.
I was going like this. I'm cringing right now, okay. It's making my heart race and have goosebumps. I saw that video and when I saw it, my mouth dropped open. And to me, that's probably the. And I don't want to use the word best. The most realistic footage I've ever seen of an ifr inadvertent IFR accident. This is something I've been wanting to talk about more and do more. Brian Rutledge, him and I have been discussing this about. He's got a whole course that he built that he puts his law enforcement pilots through. And he says, kenny, every single one of them failed this. And this is one thing we want to talk about more. And maybe that'll even be. We need to do that for a live training Tuesday coming up. That video, as horrific as it is, it shows real world where. And you see it happening. I mean, the guy's getting nervous. And what caught my eye starts out, beautiful day. Always does beautiful day. Everything's great, everybody's happy. It's a wedding. And you fly a little further and it starts getting soupy. And you see those moments when you can see right in front of him is. You can't see, but out the right hand side, you can see green. And when I'm watching that video, I know what's going to happen. But I'm like, there's, you know, in my mind I'm watching people going, land, go over there, land. Get on the ground. Knowing there's probably going to be an accident. But it continues on. He had those opportunities. And I'm not bad mouthing this guy either. It's unfortunate they're gone. I hate seeing helicopter accidents. I hate seeing helicopter fatalities. I hate it. I hate it every time. But that video is very realistic of what happens in the real world. The guy. And without reading the accident report, I'll bet you $5 they were within mile or two or five miles of their destination or he never would have kept going. It always telling you, in five years of EMS, whether it's five miles you're going or you're going 100 miles, it never fails. The closer you get to your destination, the worse the freaking weather gets. And so you as pilots where we do dumb stuff, we go, well okay, I'm gonna go a little farther, I should probably sit down, I'm gonna go a little farther. And that's. It is easy to sit back and critique others and say well, they should have landed. I've done the stupid stuff and I've told the story in our training somewhere where as a new EMS pilot I did the worst thing of all time and I survived it. But I got in the crap, the absolute crap. When I landed I said I am never doing that again. I am going to be the most conservative freaking EMS pilot on the frickin planet. Because I was brand new, out of training 210 weeks in Dallas. I knew better and what did I do? The weather forecasted was okay, but it was way lower than they forecasted. Middle of nowhere, land, Indiana, corn fields, no ground reference, lights scared me to freaking death. So we're going to talk more about that. Yes, we've seen that video. It's inadvertent. IMC is something you can train in a simulator. You could go out, fly in an airplane, most likely with a friend or someone and do some instrument stuff. But most every helicopter we fly, every trainer, there is none of them IFR certified for IFR flight. We can go out and train in them. There's no way realistically we can get in a helicopter and go fly imc unless you can afford a $2000 an hour ago or some big aircraft average or more. But the most of us, and this is where we lack in the industry, I'm going to say it, I think in the industry there's something more we could be doing. Because how do you give a pilot, a new pilot, this whole concept of flying into the clouds? The key is training to not ever get in it. But still you push yourself. Sometimes unforecasted weather, you wind up in the freaking soup. I've done it in an airplane, I've done it in a helicopter, in a makes the most sick feeling in your stomach and you get on the ground and you go, I am from now on, I swear to God, I'm not going to do anything like that again. This is one I've been thinking about for a long time. There's something more we should be doing and I don't know what it is other than a simulator, but a simulator is a simulator. You know, you're not really worrying about dying. So I don't Know the answer of that one. Let's see what else we got. Looks like we got them. All right. Well, I think we should probably wrap it up, right, 155. I said let's finish it up in an hour. Everybody wants to get on with their day. We're doing our best to start keeping them in an hour.
Hey, Kenny. Yeah. You were going to talk to him about a free little handout for everybody that was watching today.
Yes. Down below this video. I'm going to put a link as we're done. Give it a few minutes because I forgot to put the link in before getting ready because as usual, big rush. Get everything ready. I'm going to put a link down below where you can download helicopter checkride the PDF copy. And when you download the PDF copy, it will also sign you up to our ground school membership site. It's not going to cost you anything. We have some things you can take a look at like awesomeness report, training descriptions. There's 14 video chapters of the book. So you can view those videos of the book or read below the video. You can read the book or you can download the PDF. So this is our free giveaway. Every video, every event. We're going to start doing giveaways this month. We're kind of making it the helicopter checkride book. I'm still proud of it to this day. It's a good book for the beginner. It's a good book for somebody that has been flying a while. I have a DPE I've never met. They write articles about this guy in magazines. He's awesome. And he read it after the fact that and conversed a lot with me over it. And he was like, I really like your book, Kenny. I enjoy it and I've been told that by many experienced pilots. So it's for a little bit about me in the beginning and just a lot of different stuff. So that is yours free for attending copy of the book. It's a free PDF download and you will also get emailed access to our site to go and look around, see what we have to offer. See our this and that. So other than that, I think. Any other questions? I kind of want to sneak our teaser in there if you can Roll our teaser on the end there. Oh, you got it already. You're already ready to go. All right, well, I'm going to end it then. Thank you everybody that's been here. Hopefully. I think Courtney mentioned everybody's names. This keeps growing every week. Live training Tuesday is awesome. We're having a blast with it. We put a lot of time and effort in this, just like the FM Wings program. I want to mention this before we go. Gary Cleveland has spent two to three months now working on this. He's got a lot of time and effort in that, and I could have never done it. He has the patience to sit down and do what he's had to do, connecting with the FAA and software developers. We did this for you, our members. The FAA Wings credit is awesome. Again, that's a lot of time and effort that we did just for you. For our members, it doesn't matter whether you've been a member for five years or one month. We did this for you. A lot of time and effort in it. We're proud of it. And Gary Cleveland gets credit for setting all that up, because I could have never done it. I'd have pulled my hair out trying to figure that stuff out. But Gary's good at digging in and figuring out Gary, the little nitty gritty things that I'll pull my hair out. And, you know, Gary handles things like that for me because I'll just go, I can't do it.
So he gets employee of the month.
He gets employee of the month, Gary Cleveland. All right, well, Gary, thanks for everybody. I think that's it. Roll our little bumper and we will see you next live training.
Ra.
