Helicopter Check Ride Part 13 Kenny's Stupid Weather Decisions

Helicopter icing. Learn from my mistakes. I know. Does that sound bad? I made a couple of dumb decisions there and it gets pretty scary. So bottom line, man, avoid icing at all costs. You just do not want to even get involved. You do not want to do it. What do we got here? We got 15 people still watching at three hours into this. Awesome. I like doing this stuff. This is fun. Planning on doing some more of these? Maybe we'll make them a little shorter, break them down. I didn't realize how long this would actually take or how long this would go, but that's alrigh. Appreciate the comments, appreciate everybody being here, appreciate the likes that we've had. I'm sure some of you have subscribed, so if you haven't subscribed, do that. Don't see any new questions right there. Hopefully I got all those questions answered up pretty well. So the next One is chapter 13, weather decisions. Icing is yes, a weather decision. I'm going to go a little more in depth, give a couple more stories, some dumb things I've done, proper English, there's some mistakes I've made and then some feedback from other parties giving me a little hassle about weather turn down. Sometimes you just have to say no. And that's the hard part of being a pilot. That's what can get you in trouble. And sometimes you might end up losing your job by doing the right thing. And I'm sorry to say that, but there are going to be employers that are going to push you and sometimes standing up for what's right is what you have to do. I know plenty of pilots that have been fired over a weather decision and I've never been, you know, I've always stood my ground and the longer I'm at it, I'm glad that I don't have to do a lot of cross country flying at this point. I do mainly training here. If I do a ferry flight to take an aircraft somewhere, I make sure I have plenty of time. I won't do one that's like, oh, you gotta leave now. It's gotta be there by this time tomorrow, you know, halfway across the country. No, ain't gonna do it. Not when I have weather to worry about. It's just not worth the headache, it's not worth the hassle. So since there's no other comments I see there, I'm gonna go ahead and roll the weather decisions and we'll see after that for one more video.

And I hear all the horror stories when I'm, you know, at the training and, you know, we hear these things as pilots. And I go out and we go land at a hospital and a storm comes through and I have a problem with an engine starting. So the patient goes by ground, the crew goes with them. Mechanic comes out, takes care of the aircraft problem. And I'm checking the weather and they're saying like, you know, a thousand feet, I'm going 1,000ft, you know, okay, that's good. Two or three miles. Okay. It's at night and I'm thinking it's, it sounds like it's going to be all right. Well, between where I was at and to get home, I can tell you the cloud level, I don't know what it got down to 4 or 500ft. So I take off with the right intentions thinking, oh, I'm, you know, going to be okay. And the farther I got out in the middle of nowhere between where I was and getting back home, there's no weather reporting stations. About a 45 mile flight, I'm halfway in between the middle of nowhere, almost no ground reference lighting. And I keep coming down and I keep coming down and I don't even remember how low I got and I don't even want to admit how low I got, but I know that I kept flying, I kept getting lower. And what I should have done is just landed, I should have landed the helicopter and shut it down and called and said, hey, I got some bad weather and I'm on the ground and I'll, and I'll sit here until it clears or you know, in the morning we'll do whatever. But the problem is we don't want to admit that we're wrong. We don't want to go through the embarrassment of landing out in a field somewhere in the middle of nowhere and putting an EMS ship out of service because we made a stupid call influence and whether we shouldn't have. The right thing is to do is to land and just shut down and wait for better weather. But we don't want to do that. And that's why guys get themselves into trouble because we're macho. We don't want to say no. We get ourselves halfway involved into a flight and then it turns ugly and we're chicken to turn around or we're chicken to just land. And I know like an omni flight towards the end, in the beginning they would say, you know, make a 180 turn and fly back out of it. And then they changed their tune at a certain point and said, you know what, guys? With everything that's going on, all these helicopters are crashing. If you get into nasty stuff, we want you to land. We don't want you to turn around. We want you on the ground. If you start getting into the soup, land, put it on the ground, have the gusta, shut it off, call your base and say, I just landed. I'm on the ground. We're safe. Here's where we're at. You know, we're gonna wait for the weather to clear or whatever. But, yeah, you know, we make these decisions for all kinds of stupid reasons when we know better. And it's very easy to be thinking you're making the right decision and go, ah, the weather. It's good enough. I can do this. Okay? And then you run into stuff that's not forecasted, or you're just in between weather reporting stations and the weather's lower than reported. You know, there's all kinds of reasons that people get themselves into trouble. And what I was getting at there. The other part of that is, you know, there's no way really to teach new students. I mean, you could put them in a simulator and go out and put them in a, you know, inadvertent imc, which, you know, that's good training. But I just feel like I wish there was a way we could take students and show them in the real world how scary it can be and how quick it can happen. But there's no real way for you to take an aircraft out, a VFR aircraft, put it in almost IMC conditions. You know what I mean? There's. Yeah, I've thought about how can we train, you know, what can we do to really train students? So I think that's one thing, you know, other than using a simulator, which, again, it's a simulator. So, okay, there's no real fear of crashing because you're in a simulator. You can give somebody an idea of how scary it could be, but it's not the same as being out in the real world and getting scared half to death that you're going to wreck the aircraft. And, you know, here I'm coming back and just going, got it. You know, And I made it back okay, and everything was fine. But when I was in that soupy stuff and I started sifting through this low layer of clouds going, oh, my God, you know, just gonna get worse before it gets better. And I'm thinking, here I am, I'm gonna be the statistic that everybody talks about, you know, new EMS pilot going out, being brave, you know, flying when he probably shouldn't. Have been. I was almost that statistic, so, you know.