Helicopter Check Ride Part 5 Wire Strike Avoidance

So back to the question of 112 hours. I wouldn't feel guilty at all. The gentleman that I just sent that had 170 hours, he came up last fall. He's one of my ground school members. And a couple times he called me over time and he was getting frustrated, owned his own R44. He'd been at it for four years. He had eight different instructors. And he said, my instructors keep bailing on me, man. He goes, I'm bummed. Can I just come up there and can you finish me? And I said, yes, absolutely. I said, you need to go through ground school as many times you can before you get here. And he goes, I've done that. He goes, I got the written test done. And he said, I've been going over and over your videos. I sent one of my pilots down there to Texas, picked him up. Him and his R44 brought him back to Indiana. The first night I got him calmed down, we went outside and I started asking him questions.

Boom, boom, boom.

His knowledge was fine and I realized that working with him after a day or two, I just had to get his confidence up because he'd been jerked around through so many different instructors and sign offs that weren't correct and things that weren't signed off properly and this requirement didn't match the sign off. And so I got working with him and I said, man, you're in good shape. All I had to do was just get his confidence level up. He flew actually pretty good. We had to go out and polish everything. And nine days after he got here, we went and got his test. That examiner didn't, you know, he didn't mark him down because he had 170 hours. I told him ahead of time, I said, hey, the guy's had some trouble. We had to fix his log book, go out and do some more requirements and he's going to be fine. And my examiner always says, you know, they got to fly to a standard. So if you fly to a standard, I don't think it matters whether you have 40 hours or 150 hours. You need to go to the examiner and be able to perform to the practical test standards on the oral and the flight. So that's what's important is showing up and getting doing a standard hours. There can be different reasons why it takes somebody a long time. 112 hours, that's fine. I wouldn't sweat it. If you're having that much trouble, if you think you want to try another flight school, probably a good idea because not you know, instructors and students don't always mix, and it's not maybe one person's fault. Sometimes people just don't jive or a certain school doesn't jive with any one person. So I always kind of say, you know, it's never a bad idea to get another opinion. Go to a different flight school, try somewhere else and see if any of that works better for you. So I wouldn't worry about that too much. And I put a link in there for this video with Jamie, who I just talked about in the R44. You should watch that video because we just kind of talk about, you know, kind of his struggles and a little bit about what we went through to get him done and how we got him in nine days and sent him back home. And he was happy. And he said, kenny, I just went through your videos over and over and over and over. His knowledge was fine. And like I said, in the aircraft, I just had to get his confidence up a little bit. He could fly pretty good. Went over there, took the test. Examiner was happy. He even flew like a 22 knots of wind that day for a private check ride. And he did great. Let's see, what do you all need to do to fly an MD500 and an aerial saw?

That was one of my students.

You've probably seen that video of mine. It's got 750,000 views, going crazy. That's the young kid that came to me out of high school. He got his private and commercial with me, and then he found a company that said if you work the truck for a while and prove that you're going to be, you know, you're going to work hard, we'll eventually put you in the helicopter. And that's what they did. He ran the ground truck, you know, hooked up the cables, drugged the chains, did all the, all the grunt work. But he did a good job and he proved himself. And then they trained and put him in that aerosol. There's only a couple of companies that do that, so that's probably a tough one to get into. Not saying you can't do it, but that's how he did it. More and more jobs are just requiring college. That's not just helicopters. That's across the board. I mean, more and more jobs in general require college. It's unfortunate. Not saying you have to get it. I'm just saying if you're coming out of school and you have the opportunity to get some college before starting your helicopter career, I think it's wise go to college. 9 months, 3 months. Learn to fly helicopters if you can do it. I just think it's good advice. You don't have to, but great idea. So let me see if I cut everything up. Alright, I think that catches up on the guy with 112 hours.

And I.

Think we're probably ready for the next video. The next video is wire strike avoidance. Wire strike avoidance is a big deal. This was from a student of mine that we were doing some ground school while I was doing one on one with him. He's from New Jersey, his name was Lee. And so I was just kind of testing his knowledge at the going to CFI level, you know, instructional knowledge. Wire strikes is a big deal. You know, it's something that we got to think about and always, always, always be, you know, on the lookout for wires. So we'll go ahead and roll that video. We'll keep answering your questions. We have a special code 15, sorry, BR15 off to join our Helicopter alliance ground school membership. When you get to the checkout page, look on the right hand side, midway about down, put in BR15FF, click apply and it will reveal the discount. And that's available for private commercial CFI memberships along with additions of the R22 or R44 or Nstrom editions. Alright, so I think I'm caught up on questions. So we're going to roll that video and we'll see you back in just a little bit.

Always assume all towers and poles have wires. You've heard it, the next one's wire strike avoidance. You know, I made you work the last one. I'll give you my take on wire strikes. Wire strike is avoidance is a big deal. As you already know. You're a commercial guy, you've heard about it. Helicopters fly into wires. It happens. People get hurt, people get killed. Wires are absolutely everywhere. And we know this, we see them. And it's not just towers, it's thinking about wires across rivers. You know, people go, I like to go fly low along the river. Well, people string wires across rivers. This is a big one. One of the ones I train is fly over the towers versus in between the towers. And some people, some people like to argue this one, but I was trained over the wires. That's or over the tower, even if you're with a series of towers. And that's acceptable for my exam that I've been using all these years. And I've always thought going over the tower is going to be best because if I'm over the top of it and I have an Engine or equipment failure. I have a choice to go left or right. You know, on the right there's a woods, on the left maybe there's an open field. So, you know, always flying over the towers. God, they're everywhere. And going and doing off airport landings. That's where you've probably, somebody's probably told you along the way it's best to go out and, you know, visit a landing spot if you know you're going to go out somewhere and land off airport if you can. It's best to go drive there first and encourage your students to do the same thing. Go out to the area and take a look at it firsthand and find these wires because they, they can be very, very, very hard to see. Just like this picture here. I don't know how well you can see it. Probably can't see them. But just real quick, I can see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. There's 16 separate wires in this picture for this tower. Part of them, for the tower, two of them are going across some other direction. I don't know where those two are going. You know, the whole wire strike thing is, is big and.

Over the towers. Instead of going in between them this way, you know where they are fixed to that tower, you know, they're not going to be any higher, they're not going to be any lower.

Exactly. I had an EMS Czech airman show me something one time. You know the normal transmission lines that go cross country, big, tall towers. Have you ever noticed those two really tiny, small wires at the very top?

Yeah, yeah.

Have you seen those? I mean, I'm flying commercially, flying as a, you know, EMS pilot, been flying for however many years. And he points that out one night we're doing a flight and we had.

Night vision goggles on.

He goes, hey, have you ever noticed those two little, tiny wires above the others? And I looked and I'm like, wow. No, I've never seen those.

And.

There'S, I don't know, you would think the two smaller wires would be below the bigger, heavier wires, but I flew for a lot of years before I ever knew that. On a lot of these towers, you see these, you know, four, six or eight big heavy wires at the very top. There's two on some of these towers, there's two tiny wires running along the top. So flying over the top of the towers, visiting landing sites that are off airport prior to, you know, landing at them is probably the best thing to do. You know, we kind of Talked about protecting your students when you're letting them solo, they need to understand they cannot land. You know, you don't want them going off on doing airport landings because this is the kind of stuff that they'd get involved in. And, you know, I don't know. I don't know what else to say other than I know there's some statistics in my notebook on the amount of pilots that hit them and how often they're fatal. And, yeah.

It'S a high number.

It's a pretty high number. And it's. I remember jotting it down. And right now I can't spout the number off the top of my head, but. And you can never rely on anyone else. And, you know, I keep going back to the EMS thing, but I think that's good because a lot of people like you or other people may be looking to fly EMS later, and you learn a lot of good stuff. And the thing they taught us was you never trust the ground people. When they tell you there's no wires, don't believe it, because there's probably going to be wires there that they don't see. And it's not. They're not, you know, the firemen or the police officers, they're not trying to kill you. They just don't see them. And the other thing I can tell.

You is people think because of watching.

Television that we go to where we want to land and we go straight down and then we go straight up and we fly away. Well, you know, we do if we have to sometimes, but we, you know, now as a commercial guy, we. We want to come in with airspeed and on an angle, same thing, taking off if we can. So people on the ground that are not helicopter pilots, when you talk to them and they say, oh, no, you just land here in this spot, you're good. And I'll give you example. I was pretty new at this, at the EMS thing, and they told us that in our basic training, hey, never. You still get a report from the people on the ground. But don't take it as. I don't want to say, don't take it as the truth. Just realize that there's times that they don't understand wires that they think are far enough away can be too close for us, or maybe they just don't see them. And I was going to land in an accident, and the fire department says, oh, you're clear. Land in the intersection, all four sides are clear, you're good. And this is at night, and it's a little bit of rainy, snowy mix. So it's already kind of a nasty night and I'm coming in nice and slow and I'm looking around my searchlight and what do I find? Wires. So then I look over on this side, what do I find? Wires. There was wires on all four sides of this landing area and I still made it in there, but I saw the wire. So I did, you know, got to a hundred or two hundred foot hover and then did the descent the way.

I had to do to get in there.

But they flat out said no wires. Well, they just thought, I think in their minds the wires were far enough away that they weren't a problem, them not understanding how we really want to land. So, you know, that's where the really comes into my mind was one of the biggest things that kind of opened my eyes is people will tell you that oh no, you can land there, there's nothing, there's no wires or oh yeah, but they're way far away. So you don't ever trust anyone else. You have to got to stick with what you know.