Helicopter Check Ride Part 10 Flight Training Struggles

I personally know a couple pilots, they're friends of mine that I know that have had people walk into tail rotors and they've been killed. You know, people walk into tail rotors, they walk into main rotors. Not a good situation. People flock to a helicopter, so you got to be super, super careful, TD said. Any other books you can recommend to make someone safer? There's a lot of books out there. There's a lot of books that have been around for years. You can go on Amazon and search helicopter books all day long. Practical training, you know, that's what we do with helicopter. Lion Ground School is practical training, training to get you through the checkrides, training you to be a safe and prudent pilot. Making good decisions is how you stay alive and stay out of trouble. Flying the aircraft the way it's intended to be flown is how you stay out of trouble. So the next video chapter is chapter 10 and it is Helicopter Struggles. And I'll just give you a quick background on this. I pulled my customers or my members from our ground school site and also members from like the Facebook page and said, what are your struggles? What's keeping you awake at night? What is your overwhelm? What bothers you the most? And I took and kept track of all of them and I made a list of the top five of things that overwhelm people during helicopter training. So that's what the next video is about. If you have any of your own training struggles you want to mention in the comment below because that'd be great. I don't think this has changed a lot over time, but if you have something that you want to relate to, put your comment in. That's fine. You got something new that you don't hear in this, let us know of that too. Please give us a like and a share. Thanks for hanging around. Still being here. Thanks for all the comments. So let's go ahead and roll video chapter number 10 from Helicopter Checkride and we'll be back short. Hello, I'm Kenny Keller with Helicopter Online Ground School and today I want to talk about the number five helicopter training struggle. We've been polling our customers, our members of our Helicopter Online Ground School and asking them, what are your problems? What are your struggles? What are the things that you really have trouble with? And hovering auto rotations is coming up quite a bit. The thing I've seen over the years is people mess up timing. So we've got some footage we're going to show you from our online ground school where we have footage from outside and the audio, as well as I'm performing the hover autos.

So with the hovering auto rotation, it's all about timing. It's not really complicated as far as the amount of things that you have to do, but doing them at the right time is the key. So you want to reposition your hand on the throttle, have a nice hover going. Make sure you count the maneuver off. 1, 2, 3, enter. However you do it. 3, 2, 1, enter. I had a student yesterday that decided to do one and not tell me he was going to do it. A good way to scare your instructor. You want to reposition your hand on the throttle. Count off. One, two, three, enter. Have a decent hover going or somewhat stabilized hover. When we enter this, we're going to roll off the throttle. Add the right pedal. You need to pause. A key is to pause. Common mistake. Students want to roll the throttle off and yank the collective up or dump the collective or not pull it at all. You want to pause. I think 1000, and then pull. So that's the whole key. So let's give it a try. Get stabilized, reposition our hand on the throttle and think, one, two, three, enter. Throttle off, right pedal, one, one, thousand. And then pull. That was a little stiff, but I pulled too soon. Let's try another one. Focus outside, Stabilize hover, Reposition your hand on the throttle. It's all about timing. Simultaneously roll off, collect right pedal. Pause, think one, one, thousand, then a nice smooth pull up. And then don't forget to lower the collective back down. So Here we go. 1, 2, 3, enter. Throttle off, right pedal. 1, 1000. And then a nice pull down to the ground. Collective back down. 1, 2, 3, enter. Throttle off, right pedal, pause. Nice smooth pull onto the ground. Collect it back down. Count it off. 1, 2, 3, enter. Throttle off, right pedal, pull. Collect it back down. Pedals back to neutral. Cyclic, back to center. One, two, three, enter. One, two, three, enter. Throw off, right pedal, pause, pull back down.

So hopefully that helps. Hopefully you enjoyed that. Leave your comments and questions in the description box below. Click the link down below. This video if you want to learn more about our helicopter online ground school, please share on Facebook and Twitter and we'll see in the next video. Are you overwhelmed preparing for a helicopter checkride? Let's see how many of these different materials you're using. IPad App Written Test Prep Book Rotorcraft Flying Handbook Smartphone App Pilot Operating Handbook Desktop Laptop Factory Training Manual Personal Notes Flight School Handouts Factory Training Guide Practical Test Standards checkride Oral Prep Guide Maneuver Guide, Far Aim Manual, Oral Exam Guide, Commercial Instrument Manual. Does it sound familiar? There are so many different forms of things out there to study now, which instead of maybe making it easier, maybe making things harder because you are overwhelmed going through all these books and all these different resources and training materials that a person sits down to study and they just get completely overwhelmed. That's why we created Helicopter online Ground school to help guide you through. You're still going to need most of these resources, but you need a way to help your self study. We have a 24 hour test drive that I really, really like because it gives you the chance to go in, see our training firsthand, see what it's all about. You can read our customer testimonials, our member testimonials. These are real testimonials that people send me when they get done with their checkrides just because they're so excited. So if you're ready to quit stumbling through these mountains of books and see how we can help you, click the link beside this video. It's a self sign up. You can go in for 24 hours and check it out, click that link and get started today. So the next one coming up is landing and at first I was kind of surprised, but then when I think back about it, I can remember when I first got started, I can remember struggling with landings. I think takeoffs was a little easier to pick up than what landing is. So I'm going to go through and read to you what the responses are so far. The first one is simply landing, which that's cool. I said it could be brief. The next one, knowing what I'm capable of and not capable of doing under certain set of conditions such as wind strength, changing weather and traffic, making the go no good decision or go around decision. The next one is the last 100ft of auto rotations. That's definitely something that comes up a lot. Next one is confined area. Landings are tough because they are by nature confining. It can be intimidating to land amongst the trees and wonder if you have the power available to get back out of the hole you put yourself in. So that's a good one. We'll come back to that in a minute as well. Next one is weather and landing with no power and then landing with no power or engine, then pedal power push. When I'm landing it just seems counterintuitive. So let's just start with the general landing. I can remember back when I got started, you know, I trained with some good people and I've had Some awesome instructors. And all I've done is taken the things that they've taught me and used them when I was out in the aircraft teaching people. And the things that come to mind are, number one, you have to have a good setup. So this should go back before you even start. Your landing is getting a good setup. If you set it up nice, it's going to be nice. If you enter it sloppy, then it's probably going to be sloppy the rest of the way down. So that's the first tip. Next thing that comes to mind is, remember, collective controls, your angle, cyclic controls, your speed. Learning that coordination between those controls on the approach really is key. When you first get your approach set up, you should have, like, an imaginary line from the nose of the aircraft down to the spot that you're landing at. And the whole time you're coming in, you're adjusting that collective up and down, just little movements to try to stay on that line as you're approaching your landing spot. Then the next thing I'm thinking of is your speed. It should always look like you're approaching those numbers at the same speed. You should start out most likely, you're going to be probably usually at 60, might be 50, might be 70. What? Depending on what you're flying. But we'll use 60 for an example. You want to slow the aircraft down from the very beginning all the way down to the end. It should be a slow progression, meaning if you start at 60, by the time you get down to the end, you're going to be at zero. And you want to gradually slow the aircraft down the whole time that you're coming in. Now, some guys teach a faster approach, and if you're doing those faster approaches, that takes more work. When you get down to the end, because you're coming in fast, then you're going to put a flare on it and then level it back out. And you're changing power and you're changing your pedal settings, you might be having to mess with the throttle. That's what makes these landings a lot harder. If you use the style of approach where you come in slower, and if you do it right and you come in nice and slow, all those changes are going to be very minute in turn, making a nicer approach. Now, I know some instructors like to argue and say, oh, but you got to keep that speed all the way up to almost to the end because of the height velocity diagram. The high velocity diagram is not geared for landing. It's geared for takeoffs. If you're gradually slowing the aircraft down the entire approach. It just makes the end of the approach so much easier. So let's say you start your approach at 60, you have your angle, you start flying it down, you're going to go to 55 and then to 50, then to 45, so that at the end you're just coming in, keeping it real nice and level. Your changes are very small with your controls and I think that's a big key. So let's talk next about our member that said, the making the no go decision or go around decision. That one I want to elaborate on this falls back to setting the approach up nice. If you come around and let's say you turned a little tight and your airspeed was a little off and your altitude a little bit off and you're trying to fix all that prior to starting your approach, let's say you enter it just a little bit sloppy again. It causes it to be sloppy all the way down. It's best just to say, you know what, I'm going to go around, set it up again and try this again. And usually it'll come out a lot better if you enter it kind of sloppy. It's just the way it's going to work out. It's going to be sloppy approach. I can tell you in all the years, people don't generally want to go around and I highly recommend going around often. Don't be afraid to go around. That's where the macho comes into play. And guys think, oh, I can do this. I'm going to prove to my instructor I can do it. And it's not. Most of the time it's not worth it. It's easier just to go around and set it up again. Or even if, say you enter the approach and you're a third of the way through or halfway through and it's just sloppy and it's not feeling good, go around, make your radio call, pull in the power, go around and set it up again. There's nothing wrong with that. Being able to make the decision to go around, I think is pretty huge. And I think it's something that in general, a lot of guys don't go around when they should go around. So in that respect, as far as go arounds, if you have the time, you've got the fuel, you're having a good day or even a bad day, doesn't matter if your gut's telling you to go around, just go around, go around, set it up again, the next one, the last 100ft of auto rotations, one thing that comes to mind on that is what I teach is start your flair about treetop level. Most of your handbooks usually say 50ft, some say 75ft, some say 40ft. I like treetop level because that's just easier for me to imagine. As I'm coming in on my auto rotation, I can glance usually over and go, okay, there's the tree line right about now is a good time to start the flare. When I was a new instructor, I was struggling with teaching autos, and I hired the older instructor to come in and go out and work with me a little bit. And the thing that he taught me was do quick stops prior to doing auto rotations. Because that quick stop is essentially the flare that you're going to do in your auto rotation. It happens faster in the auto rotation, but it's essentially the same thing. And if you kind of warm up with some quick stops, that a lot of time helps you with that flare in your auto rotation. And the other thing that he taught me was start with a gentle flare. And as you get closer to the ground, make it a bigger flare. A bigger flare, A bigger flare. So start gentle and keep pulling it. And you can kind of judge, depending on the wind and your conditions, whether you're going to need a really aggressive flare. Or it could be more of a shallow flare. If you pull too much too quick. That's what a lot of guys do. And then they balloon up and it makes it all a big mess. Onto the confined area landings comment. Again, this falls back to if you're not comfortable with it, go around, don't do it. You may choose that this landing spot's just not good. If you have a spot that you were going to try to get in and you decide it's too dangerous or it's just too tight, then don't do it. Go find another place to land. We did that. Common in the EMS environment, you go out to a call, a fire department has a spot set up somewhere. You go do your reconnaissance, and you're flying around and you're going, man, that's an awful tight spot they have right there for us. And just maybe a quarter mile down the road is a great big, huge empty parking lot. The people on the ground don't always see those bigger areas. So a lot of times we would just say, hey, we see your spot. But there's another spot just down the road. It's a lot more open. We're gonna go land down there. So on the confined areas, don't be afraid to go around, don't be afraid to abandon it and not even land there. I mean, do you have to get in that one specific spot on that same question? It can be intimidating to land amongst the trees and wonder if you have the power available to get back out of the hole you put yourself in. Absolutely right. I've done it where I've went in somewhere and I was too heavy to get out, so I either had to burn off fuel, have somebody get out and walk over and meet you at another landing spot. It does happen. So it is one of the things that you have to really consider. Don't top off your tanks and then go fly into a confined area because you probably won't get back out. And I, it sounds kind of silly, but I've done it. Wasn't thinking, oh, let's top it off where we put it away, oh, let's go down their confined area. Landing, and then you land somewhere and you can't get out because you're too heavy. So proper planning is probably the biggest one on that. And also flying the slow approach, that approach into that confined area should be really, really slow so that you have the opportunity to stop pulled into a hover or you have the opportunity to just go around if you see a danger. Maybe you see a wire in the last hundred feet that you couldn't see at 500ft or a tree or whatever the case may be. If you're doing a really nice slow approach, it gives you that option to just go around, to just fly away and not make the landing weather and landing with no power. You know, if you're always using good technique and you're trying to stay over in open areas and trying to give yourself plenty of altitude is going to be your best way of trying to deal with that engine failure. You know, unless you're working on a cfi, you're not out there doing landings without an engine. You're not doing full down autos, you shouldn't be. If you're not working on your cfi, there's no good reason to be doing full downs. Insurance companies don't like them because a lot of helicopters get wrecked with guys doing full down autos and it's just really not necessary. And in the event you lost your engine, if you have rpm, altitude and airspeed and you've got an open area to go to and you do it right, you're probably going to walk away. You might not even damage the aircraft. But if you really lose the engine, who cares? We don't really care about the Aircraft, we want you to walk away. So by using good pilot technique and being in the good position that if you do have that an engine failure, you've got somewhere to go. And when you get down to the end, you're gonna flare it about 8 to 10ft, you're gonna level it out and cushion that thing onto the ground. So, you know, landing without an engine is, it is intimidating, it can be scary. But you can't just let that completely hold you back because you're worried about the engine quitting. You know, flying a aircraft that has good maintenance and doing your good pre flights and getting all the required maintenance and using good pilot techniques, most likely you're going to be able to survive that engine failure. The next one, another guy says, same thing. Landing with no power or engine, and then the last one, pedal power push. When I'm landing, it just seems counterintuitive. I'll go back to what I was explaining earlier about if you make that approach slow, if you take your time, it makes all those things fit together a lot nicer at the end. And it just makes your approach easier to fly. It looks better, it feels more comfortable. And I really believe that slower approach is key. And I would just go back to that and add, I can remember when I did my private checkride, I flew with an examiner who's been, you know, flying since dirt was new, a guy really respected in the industry. And he knew the guy I was flying with or the kid I was flying with flew the faster approaches. So when I do my, my normal landing, I can remember when we were to the end, he goes, what'd you think of that? And I'm like, I thought it was pretty good. And he's like, wow, he was, I thought you were coming in pretty hot, you know. He goes, I think that was awful fast. And we sat and talked about it after the fact, and I passed and it wasn't a problem. He just explained to me that why the slower approach was a better alternative than the faster approaches. And when he went through and said, hey, this is where the height velocity diagram does not pertain to landing. It's geared for takeoffs. And he said, coming in on landing, you have low pitch applied, low power setting, you're not working the engine as hard. It's most likely not going to quit. It could, but it's a lot more likely it's going to quit. When you're taking off and you're working that engine hard, pulling power and you got a high pitch on the rotor blades, most likely that's more of the time when you're probably going to have an engine failure. And today I want to cover number two issue that our customers are relaying to us about their helicopter training struggles. Number two is complaints about helicopter CFIs. And I'm going to read to you exactly some of the comments what these men and women are saying. Yep, the ground portion was the hardest. I had many different instructors and they were all impatient, didn't want you to ask questions. Once an instructor learns it, they think it is easy and they forget how they struggled to learn it all. I think the general attitude of CFIs is the biggest hurdle. Most places require you to teach and the CFIs feel like they are doing time until they can get out of there. I can't wait to be a CFI because I plan on having a different attitude. That's why being able to watch the videos was helpful. I could watch them over and over until I understood the concept without a cranky cfi. Next one. My biggest concern is obtaining foundational knowledge. All my fixed wing and now heli training instructors were there to build hours for their future jobs. They did not really want to spend much time on ground training. Students are forced to compile their own study course and hope it will get them through the oral examination. I especially see this as I begin organizing my son's flight education. So that is a common problem. And I can understand where the CFIs are coming from too. You know, I've been that route. I played the game new instructor gung ho, and you go out, start doing the job, but pretty soon you realize that you're working for peanuts and you're gonna have to work all these hours and get all this time under your belt before you can even get a decent paying job. So that is where a lot of the frustration comes from. With helicopter CFIs, I did the same thing when I was new and got frustrated over time and couldn't wait to get to the next job and the next job. And then I did the EMS thing for 5 years along with everything else I did. And now I've kind of made the full circle back to instructing again. And now all these years later, now this is what I enjoy to do. This is what I like to do. I like to teach and I like to go out in the aircraft and do emergency procedures and, you know, take somebody from off the street and then help them get to the point where they're a rated pilot. And in turn, that's why we developed helicopter online ground school. A lot of places have really great ground school programs and that's all good. Some places not so much. So we're here. If you're just wanting added help or if you're at a school where you're just really not getting any ground, sometimes instructors say, here's the book, read it. So if you're not happy with your cfi, you always have the option of getting another cfi, changing flight schools, if that's what you have to do. It's your money, it's your training and you have the right to get quality ground instruction. It's that simple. Weather has been coming up as the top one as of right now. Moving forward, I'm assuming that might change a little bit. But right now, weather, weather, weather keeps popping up. So I want to read to you what some of the members are saying. When I did my checkride, the emphasis on weather and all the PTS required, weather charts and what they mean and how long they are valid and what the purpose for all are under talked about. Totally understandable. I get that one. Weather is something all pilots have to have good grasp on for their entire training and career. A good start to grasping that at the private level could always be helpful. They sneak up on you. That's what I remember the most. And we'll cover one more. Weather. There's no factor in aviation with so many changing variables as weather. We have charts and websites and metars, etc. But so much information at our fingertips that it might as well be written in Greek sometimes. This is an area that gave me particular problems. So I totally get that. Weather is kind of a pain, but it's, you know, very important. It's all a part of the go, no go decision, making decisions whether you should even fly or not. And those decisions aren't always easy. So what we do have coming up for you is a 600 page presentation on weather that we're putting together. And it's needless to say, it's overwhelming. And it's going to be overwhelming for me to get through all of it and get it all recorded. But that's the next project because that's what everybody's asking for. So we thought we'd get some weather out there for you. Meanwhile, I want to talk about some of the tools that we have now in our arsenal for checking weather and so on and the foreflights, what I've just been using recently. I'm sure there's others out there. I know some guys said, hey, try this one, try that one. Foreflights, just the one I know, a lot of people were using and the one that I picked up and I've been kind of slow on the technology end of things. I've been old school and wanting to stick to the old ways of doing everything. And now that I got myself a mini iPad and I've started using it and started using the foreflight, I realized how cool this thing really is. So like right here in real time, you can pull up an airport and real quick see, oh, there's a bunch of green, there's some yellow. Hmm. I was going to fly that way. I guess I better pay a little more attention here and see what's going on. So you can at the map have a real quick view of the weather. You can go to a specific airport and get your metars and TAFs. Pull those right up. And this is cool because it gives you, you know, a simple breakdown. Visibility 10 miles view 1100 broken 1400 overcast 2700 temperature dewpoint. So you can get the taffs, you can get the metars and it seems like a really pretty cool weather tool to just be able to use on the fly. So I'm just learning how to use this. But it's cool up here. Like in the left hand corner, VFR and lightning. Click on that and you have dew, point spread, temperature, visibility, surface1, ceiling sky coverage, pireps, lightning, obstacles. Really, really cool stuff. And I'm glad that I've finally jumped on board and started, you know, kind of learning how to use the weather on the iPad. It's really cool. So while we're putting together this new weather presentation, meanwhile we do have about a 20 minute weather presentation that's in pre flight preparation tab under weather information. So we do have that that you can look at right now. And then we've got another big weather presentation coming up. So keep the feedback coming in. You can comment right down below this video if you want to relay some of your flight training struggles. We're going to keep those comments coming in and we'll keep tallying them up so that we can be in order know what really are the biggest problems and then we'll work kind of down the list. So keep that feedback coming in and we'll see in the next one.