Helicopter Instructor Hangar Talk Live

Foreign.

This is the last time I'm doing a video this year. No more for the rest of the year. We're done making videos. Oh, wait, it's the last day of the year.

Coffee with Kenny.

Coffee with Kenny.

Finally in person.

Yeah. Day 298. And this is Batman, in case you didn't know. His alias is Dan Taz Grismo, but he's really Batman. Because you've wondered about why you never see Dan and Batman in the same place. That's the reason why. Hey, let us know where you're logging in from. Let us know you can hear us and see us. And today we are doing, as we put out, hanger talk. We've been talking about, you know, we get together after hours and when we're not making videos and we talk about all these kinds of things that instructors talk about that we see in student training, and we see students doing right and doing wrong. We see all these different things. And we thought, you know what, last night we went out for supper and we're like, let's make some notes and let's do a video, a live event on New Year's Eve and just talk about all the things that are. A lot of the things that we see, just things that were popping up off the top of our head. In case you don't know this gentleman, it is. He is dan Taz Christman, 2018 Flight Instructor of the Year. Batman, also known as Batman. We did author this book together, top 10 checkride tips that is available on our site, helicopterground.com we bought a whole pile of them and we ship those out to you for only shipping and handling. We've already bought the book, so you can go to helicopterground.com and get those anytime for just shipping and handling. So anybody can they hear us, see us? Awesome, Lou. Great. Well, let's see. Which one should we start with first? Well, we'll go right down the list. Sure. Last night we were talking about one of our HOGS members, and we're really proud of this HOGS member. And we're not going to mention his name or where he flies so that we're not, you know, directly calling him out. But he will probably watch this video at some point because I know he keeps up on our videos, probably. And we just saw him the other day post a video on YouTube or Facebook, either one, whichever, doesn't matter. And he had passengers in his video. He took off. I mean, fires it up and you see he's at a building and away he goes. And I'M like, whoa. And I almost called him out on Facebook and I thought, no, I'm not gonna say anything. And somehow it came up last night in a conversation.

Yeah, we're talking about that.

And I don't know who brought it up, but we both saw the same thing. You know, hover pre takeoff checks should be done every single time you take off. Even in the EMS world, we were expected. Not just expected, we were required to do a hover pre takeoff check before every single takeoff. Whether you're just going for maintenance or you're going to the hangar or you it's in a medical emergency, which the medical emergency is for the crew in the back. It's not you as the pilot. We were required by our EMS company to do a hover pre takeoff check. And they said, guys, if we observe you, if a Czech airman or someone from the company observes you doing a takeoff without having a pre takeoff check, you won't work for us anymore. So if it's in the EMS environment, if you're expected to do that, why are you as a private pilot or a commercial pilot or whatever it is you're doing? Why are you taking off without having a pre takeoff check?

Right. It doesn't take that long, you know, a few seconds, pick it up.

Exactly.

Check your stuff over and then you can go on from there. It doesn't take long at all.

What is, exactly what are you looking for during a hover pre takeoff check? What are you looking for and what method do you use when you're flying?

Ah, man, you know, basically I want to pick it up, check one. I'm checking to make sure everything feels right with the helicopter. But then I'm also looking at all my engine gauges. I should have checked them before I took off too. But then once I get load on the road or stuff like that, then I want to look at that kind of stuff too.

Right.

Other thing, one of our instructors back, back in Vegas, he always likes to say, you know, back up a little bit and look at the ground, make sure you don't have like a pool of oil or you're something didn't fall off the helicopter or something like that. So I put that in my, my pre hover or my takeoff checks as well. So big things like that, you know, knowing where the winds are, that comes with actually picking it up as well. But yeah, things along those lines, you're.

Giving the helicopter time to spit, sputter, miss Puke. See how much power you're pulling.

Yeah.

Looking for anything that just Isn't right. Yeah. A dead. Maybe one of your gauges went dead, you know, and those are common little trainers. It's very common. You look down and, oh, I got no oil pressure. Reach down and flick it with your thumb, and then boom, it pops back up again. What if you don't have any oil pressure and you just took off and you didn't check and you seized the engine on takeoff?

Yep. So not something you want to see 50ft in the air. I'd prefer seeing it at 2, 3ft in the air, you know, so I can. If I see that oil, no oil pressure, it drops off or whatever reason, I can set it back down, figure out what's going on. I don't want to see it, you know, as I'm taking off. And now I got to come back around and figure out where I'll put this helicopter down at.

Right.

So.

So shame on you, Hogsmember, who we saw the other day on Facebook. You know who you are. You're good kid, and you've been doing great, and you're out there in the world and you're doing it. But this is one thing we're going to talk about, is what people do after they get their license and ratings. Right?

So I think that's what brought that. That one up as we're talking about that.

I'm sure it was. So we're watching you guys and girls, so that. That. That was when we had in the list what people do after they get the license. Right. And should we start with the good or the bad?

We can start with the bad, and then we can give them good.

Something positive.

We'll end on a positive note.

There you go. So you said bad first? Yeah, why not first? Okay, I'll pick one, then. You pick one. The first one I pick is, okay, I teach everybody, you know, hover pre takeoff check. And if you're on the ramp and you're going to go out to the Runway to take off, it should be, stop, clear your towel. Stop, clear your tail. Stop, clear your towel. Left, right, stop, clear your tail. Get to where you want to go. And what I see people do and what I hear people do, I hear them even say. I've had people come back and say, well, I was flying with Joe Blow the other day, and he said, well, Kenny's not here anymore and I don't have my license, so I don't have to do those clearing checks anymore. Well, last night Taz and I watched a short video on YouTube or. No, it was on it was on YouTube, but somebody shared it from Twitter or whatever. Here's a guy in a bell helicopter in a park, what should be a helipad, but it's not a proper safe helipad because it has a fence over here. Then it has a sign. So this guy lifts up this helicopter and what's he do? Turns his tail into the sign or the fence, whichever. There were some arguments about which he hit. But what the point is, he should have done a walk around. In his walk around he would have saw that, okay, fence right here, sign right here. Why do you park? I mean, apparently he flew it in there and parked it. Well, maybe not. Maybe some other pilot left it. Let's say another pilot left it and he's taken over. When he did a walk around, he should have noticed the fence and he should have noticed that pole. Also, we did a pre takeoff check. He was in a bell and it was the right hand side. So if he'd have looked outside clear, right?

Oh yeah, he would have seen it.

The fence is right there and the sign is right there. Why did he do it? I don't know, I wasn't there. But there's no reason for it. He should have caught it on the walk around and he should have looked over there and caught the tail or thought, okay, I don't want to swing my tail to the right, maybe I need to hover a little bit to the left and then turn. Maybe he's turning into the wind. Whatever the case is, that could have been totally avoided. And one of the comments somebody made was, oh, well, don't. You can't just blame the pilot. That's an improper helipad. We land in unimproved areas all the time. Just because somebody painted an H there doesn't mean it's safe. So sure, they're wrong in the way they built that helipad. It still falls back to the pilot in command who apparently probably didn't do a walk around and didn't clear his tail before he turned his tail into it. And the EMS company I worked for for five years said, guys, girls, guess who's wrecking helicopters within our industry, they're in our own company, they've been in business 40 years. And they said it's pilots with more than 5,000 hours. Pilots that's been in EMS more than 15 years and you know, pilots flying that specific aircraft for more than 10 or whatever. And they said, sure, younger, newer pilots wrecked and turned their tails into stuff too. But they said in that company it was the older pilots that were getting laxed, not doing hover pre takeoff checks, not clearing the tell, and clearing the tell every single time. So kind of a little rant there. But that's when I hear people after the fact, well, I'm not doing that anymore. And that's what I see. And we keep going back to basic 101. The way we, the way we were trained and we were brand new to it. Somebody taught us the right way to do things. You need to take those basic 101 things that we learned, and those are supposed to stay with you throughout your career, whether you're a private pilot or you're going to be a commercial pilot, or you're going to go be a CFI and you're going to train people. Those good habits that we learned from day one are the ones that you need to hang on to, right?

Absolutely. I agree. I see it all the time. Not calling out any schools or anything. There's several schools back in Lafayette or in Las Vegas, but I see that all the time. We get pilots, they get, once they get the rating, they're doing that exact same stuff. They're doing, you know, quick stops on to their, you know, to the spot they're trying to touch down at and everything. I'm like, there's no reason for doing stuff like that. You know, they're picking up and spinning around and, you know, just kind of taking off and, you know, you posted a video the other day of some guy on a 44 doing some weird stuff over a lake and then backing into a spot. There's absolutely zero reason to do anything like that. And that's, you know, obviously you weren't taught to do stuff like that. At least you shouldn't have been taught to do stuff like that when you're doing your training initially. So, you know, just once, once you get that certificate in your pocket, doesn't mean that you can disregard everything that you were taught. You know, we teach things for a reason and it's to keep you safe and to keep, keep you from bending metal. So.

Yep. And that's what our company told us in that five years was they go, guys, the helicopters are getting wrecked near the ground. They're not getting wrecked in flight, they're getting wrecked tails going into hangar doors, wires, poles, fences. That's what's getting them wrecked is experienced pilots with more than 2,000 hours turning their tail into something.

Yep.

Happens all the time. Okay, so I did the first one on what I see that goes bad after they get this is after they get their license, right? What's one? You got one.

Well, I know we talked about on there, but you know, doing a. What I see, especially in Vegas, the weather is usually pretty nice, but it's not always nice, especially this time of year. We're getting snow in Las Vegas, we're getting winds and rain and stuff like that. And you know, people will go out and I call it the 360 degree weather sweep. You know, they go outside and do a turn, look around. Oh yeah, it's good. So we're going to go take off and go fly. Well, realistically that's probably not necessarily the best thing. Getting the proper weather briefing, you know, calling flight service and getting that kind of stuff, you know, along with that stuff that you get from that pre flight weather briefing. You know, you can pick up your notams and your TFRs, things like that. And I think that's hugely important to see what the weather's going to do. Here in Indiana the weather's changing. Just on my drive up here from Rochester, the weather changed within five miles and within 15 minutes. So I mean you might take off and you have this nice big hole that you're out there flying around and by the time you're done and you're trying to come back, you can't get into the airport. So that's definitely a reason to check your weather. I see it all the time and I have to, I have to bust my instructors back in Vegas too because I'll ask them about their weather briefing and I didn't get one. Oh, well, why not?

You know.

Oh, the student was supposed to do that. Well, okay, do it with them. You know, there's no reason not to do it.

Yep. And that's why, you know, we have these fatal accidents in the EMS industry is because pilots flying into bad weather and these guys are usually more than 2000 hours professional pilots with instrument ratings, they get themselves in troubles and kill themselves and their crew. Private pilot. What? Private pilot. Why would you think that you could be even better than the guy in the professional industry? Sure. You go outside like Dan said, if you're just going around the pattern and it's beautiful outside, that's one thing. You did go outside, you minimum went, okay, what's going on? You know, how Indian is it clear? What's the sky look off to the west? Is there a storm coming? If you're just going from the pattern, it doesn't take long to look out and go, oh boy, there's some crappy weather coming in, we better cut this short. But if you're leaving the airport and you're going somewhere, you damn well better be doing some pre flight weather briefing because this is what gets people killed in general aviation. It's not just helicopters. Fixed wing too.

Yeah, fixed wing and rotor. So you know the rotorcraft, it's a little bit easier. If you run into some bad weather, you can set it down right. You can't really do that in an airplane, so. But I see it on both sides. It's not one aircraft or another.

All right, I'll take the next one. And the one that came to my mind is not studying after you get your license. Sure, it's different. Once you get your license, you're not going to have to study again. Let's just say it's just private pilot only and that's all you're ever going to do. You study hard to get through the ratings, you get your license, okay, you're now a rated pilot. But so many of them just don't study again at all, don't pick up a book and review. They don't review emergency procedures. Recently our operations manager, Brian Rutledge told me a story. He was out at an airport and some guy said, hey, do a flight review for me, I got to take off, would you do it for me for this other student? And the guy had a high performance airplane sitting out there and very quickly the guy is not sure with horsepower of his own high performance airplane and didn't have his documents on him. And you know, Brian's asking these questions so pretty quickly he's like, dude, you need to go back home and come back with your, come back with your, you know, your paperwork and refresh your knowledge a little bit and we'll, and we'll go after this again. And we see that a lot, all the time.

I don't know how many times I've, somebody will come to me for a flight review and I'll open up their logbook and I'll go, okay, when was the last time you flew? It looks like about two years ago when you did the last flight review. I mean, that's not necessary. I mean, sure, you're still meeting the requirements, but what exactly are you trying to get from the flight review? When you're doing the flight review, you're supposed to be held to the PTS standards, right? So if you're a commercial helicopter pilot, you're going to be held to those standards. So if you can't, you know, do your 180 auto, you know, within 100ft. Guess what? You're probably not gonna pass your flight review. You know, so things like that, getting in the books, it doesn't take long at all, you know, to read through an emergency procedure or something like that. One of the guys I follow on online, he does a thing, part of his pre takeoff checklist while he's letting his aircraft warm up is, is he sits there and he goes through his emergency checklist and he reads through about three or four of them every time he flies. And I think that's a very good, you know, whether or not he's actually, you know, what he's doing. You know, he's actually reviewing it, and I think that's a good procedure to use. So. And that's going to help you stay in the books. But, you know, reading a book is not expensive. You can, you can pick up a book and flip through it. You know, obviously the guys that are watching this are going to be hopefully staying up more proficient because we're, you know, Kenny does a lot to keep people proficiently that way. But, you know, it's. It's something. If you invested so much money into this certificate that you got and it could save your life someday. So put the, put the effort into it on the ground too. Stay up in the books.

Knowledge is everything.

It is.

And you can be competent in the aircraft and your knowledge can completely suck.

Oh, absolutely.

And we have so many of our HOGS members that tell us, you know, hey, I keep hogs or I bought an unlimited membership or I bought a lifetime back when those were available. So I can go back and review. Yeah. And. And they tell us that. Right. I'm not just making that up. We have a lot of people that like. I like to log in because I can just go in and review aerodynamics every once in a while or then go in the specific section for R22 or Instrument R44 and review emergency procedures. And a lot of us don't like to read anymore. I'm guilty. I don't really like to read either. If I want to learn about something and there's somebody that's got a video course out there and I can sit and watch the video. I've watched my own videos. When I went to, like do a biannual or get checked out in R44 or whatever, I'll go back and review my own videos just to review my knowledge. Because nobody can keep every. You can't keep every single piece of all this knowledge fresh in the top of your mind all the time if you're not at least occasionally going back, you know, reviewing the PoH and just for half an hour going through emergency procedures.

You know, I do that too every time I teach aerodynamics in a helicopter. Since I swap back and forth between airplanes and helicopters, I. I'll go back and I'll review the, the AVI or the aerodynamics section in HOGS and just. Oh yeah, that's right, I remember that now. And it keeps me sharp too. So don't think that just, you know, once you get your certificate, you can forget all that kind of stuff. You know, it's something that you need to keep fresh on most.

Generally when I go to build a presentation once in a while I do them from memory. But normally before I build it or before I shoot it, I'll sit down and open up the Helicopter Flying Handbook and just breeze over it again or whatever manual I need. Many times before I teach something, I sit back and go through it just to refresh my memory to make sure I'm stating it correctly. Or maybe I'm going and checking the new helicopter handbook that just came out this year because not a lot changes and this is something we've been talking about. A lot of things don't change year to year to year, but there are certain things that do. So going back to like the Helicopter Flying Handbook and getting the new publication when it comes out, spend 20 bucks or go online to the FAA website and download it for free and cruise through that one more time and look for things that, yeah, I was taught this way. But now like the vortex ring state and the selling of power. It's been an argument for years now. They finally changed it in the Helicopter Flying Handbook just so that now everybody's more of on the same page. You're going in for flight review. You need to know that. You need to know what the FAA now considers Vortex Ring state versus Song of Power and the new Richard. Not new, but the shard recovery technique that's now in the FAA Helicopter Flying Handbook now an accepted method as of per the FAA manual. Okay, so we'll do. I did two, you did one, you got one more bad. They do after getting their license. You hit a bunch of them. We hit a bunch of these already.

Let's see. I don't know, what else do we have on there? Well, I kind of, I kind of touched on the notams piece, but something I wanted to bring up since we are starting to get into that political season now.

That's a good one. He brought this up Right before we went live. This is a good one. I'm like, remember to talk about that today when we're live.

So doesn't matter which side you're on, right? So we've got all these politicians that are going to be flying around the country and they're gonna be giving talks and speeches and stuff like that. Well, guess what is gonna go with them? TFRs. So you're gonna have all these pop up temporary flight restrictions wherever these people are talking. And so the best way to check those call flight service. Right. So we have an examiner that all that always asks us what's the, the best way to get the notams or to pick up the flight restrictions, the TFRs and stuff like that. And it's through flight service. They're the ones that actually publish it onto the web pages and stuff like that. But they're the ones that get the information first. So if you call them, they're going to tell you. Right. And you can use foreflight and you can use the TFR webpage that the FAA has and it does a pretty good job and they're fairly accurate. But you know, you could get caught. I've seen it before where people have gotten caught, where they're like, oh yeah, my foreflight says this and I was fine. And then you get right in the middle and that TFR pops up. Well, crap, now you're screwed. So call flight service. It's easy. It's a free call. Right. 1-800-QBX Brief. So there you go, call them and they're there to help you. And then along with that, flight following is very good too. So if you're talking with somebody, guess what? The controller you're talking to probably knows that the TFR is going to go into effect and he can tell you before you even get there. So I can't emphasize that enough as well.

That was a good one. I was glad you brought that up just a little bit ago because I'm like, oh yeah, because it will. I mean, it's been pretty quiet TFR wise recently, seems like anyway. Yep. But you're gonna in the next 11 months. And again, as Tess said, doesn't matter politically what you, what you think of and we don't care. It doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter.

They're going to be traveling around campaigning and that's going to be TFRs popping up all over the place. Yep, absolutely. Well, hey, let's check in with Heather and see do we have a lot of people watching? How many people we got watching.

We have 31.

Nice. That's awesome. Do we have any good questions you want to add?

I do.

Yeah. Go ahead and switch over to your audio there, and. And let's see what you got.

There we go. So Tink lying. He says, my job with the Thermo King of 24 years, we are required to take continuing education to keep our certificates every year. Is it not the same in the helicopter world?

All right, you want to go back to two hours?

It depends on what company you work for.

Sure.

You know, we have a lot of tour operators out in Vegas, and they do reoccurring. They're part 135. So 135 operators usually have some kind of a recurring checkride they have to do and recurrent training every year. So I would assume ems, I would assume, would have the same type of thing. Any kind of business aviation would have the same type of thing. On the private sector, though, you just have your flight review every two years. That's between you and an instructor. So.

Sure.

There's not a whole lot between that. But, you know, it just depends on where you're. What company you work with.

In the 135 world, you're gonna have, you know, a 135 company is always gonna have some kind of recurrent training. The five years I was with the company I was with, all we really had was once a year we had our 135 checkride, and then we had a certain amount of hours of testing we had to do online through throughout the year or every quarter. I can't remember now how it worked, but. So in ems, yes, we had some minimum things we had to do between both a checkride once a year, 135, and then online testing on all kinds of subjects. Pretty much everything that a pilot needs to know about. But then on the flip side of that, if Joe Blow starts, you know, ABC helicopter company, and he's a part 61, and he hires five pilots.

And.

He'S just operating under the. You know, doing what he wants. Sure. An operator should have something in place to make sure his pilots stay current or her pilots stay current, but there is no guarantee.

Right.

So that's probably. It's a great question because we know in the industry there's. There's companies and schools that have policies in place on recurrent training, and that's the way it should be. Are there companies out there that don't have recurring training? Yes. Or do they have. Are there companies that just. Oh, here, I'll just Sign your logbook. And in aviation, like any industry, there's a lot of great things that go on and there's a lot of horse manure that should never go on and slips through the cracks. And unfortunately the world we live in.

Yep, yeah, I see that a lot. Like part 61, like he was saying, or part 91, you know, just once you get your certificate, you know, you only have to depending on what helicopter you're flying. If you're with the Robinson, obviously you've got, you might, depending on your hours and stuff like that, you might have to do it every year until you hit your 200 hours. But there's not really anything stabilized or you know, set in stone saying that this is what you have to do every year other than your flight review. And it's only required an hour ground and an hour flight and got a few topics in there at the FA says per the regs that you have to cover as an instructor. But that's really it. There's nothing, there's no structured program or anything like that. Whereas like we were saying, with a company, usually, you know, they're going to send you to flight safety or you know, one of these other companies or they're going to have some kind of in house training or something like that. So when you start getting into the more professional line of work, you probably will have something like that. But just for the average guy, you really don't. So that's why it's very important. Like we were saying, stay in the books and make up your own training. The FAA's got the wings program, which is very good where you attend seminars and do some online training. AOPA's got a lot of free tutorial type stuff where you can go on and watch a video and things like that. And of course you got hogs, so you know, you can, you got those resources there to go in and watch all the videos and stay up on it. So.

Yeah, and we'll mention the US Helicopter safety team.

Absolutely. They got a lot of good stuff.

And the FAA lessons learned library, which is, they're adding content to that. Now. The last look, there was only one helicopter accident in there, but they promised that between now and heli expo they're going to have several three or four or five that they're putting in there and they're going to build over that with time. That's, you know, topics that are current in the industry right now, things that are going on, things people need to be thinking about and looking at and why helicopters are getting Wrecked. And while people are losing their lives. And the thing I keep saying is it's great when organizations do things to help reduce accidents, but it still comes back to us. It's not sitting around going, oh, there's all these horrible fatal accidents. Well, what's the FAA going to do? What's the NTSB going to do? They can only do so much. It still relies on us to be current, have good knowledge. Either be in a retraining program of your own. Of your own, or you being with somebody who's providing you with recurrent training. It's us that's going to reduce the accidents.

It really is.

It's not the faa, it's not the ntsb.

We're the ones causing the accidents. It's up to us to reduce them.

Exactly so. And we know why airplanes and helicopters get wrecked most of the times because the pilot did something stupid.

Absolutely.

Yep. We know this.

Very rarely does the aircraft actually do something dumb.

Sometimes. But.

Yeah, sometimes, but not that much. Not that much.

Any other questions that you want to bring up while we're going?

Let's keep on.

Let's see here. Everybody's agreeing with you about continuing your improvement in education. Brian Rutledge is here making some nice comments.

And.

Only other question so far is, is there a glossary for all the abbreviations in a manual like IFR and tfr? Hold up, let me get back to you.

Yes, there, there is a pilot controller glossary that has a lot of that stuff in. In it, but it doesn't have everything. Section one, I believe it is, of the FARs is all definitions and you can get a lot of that stuff in there. Otherwise it's more look in the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge. I got a glossary back there that you can look stuff up, the helicopter flying handbook, things like that.

But you know, most all the manuals have a glossary.

They do, yeah. But you know, you can always Google eyes something, you know, put it in there and it'll pop it up. So. But yeah, there's as far as the FAA resources, there are stuff out there is stuff out there. So.

All right, well, let's go to. This would be good timing to go to preflight since we just talked about not very often. Well, most accidents are caused by the pilots doing dumb stuff. Yep. We know this. We agree to that and that's what we. That's our opinion. So pre flights, one of the things that we talked about last night and we talked about how this is one of the. We can add this to the things that guys do or girls do after getting their license. Not everyone. There are people. You know, there's one guy I can think of, Dr. Nick, that owns the black helicopter. We use that guy pre flights now like he did 20 years ago. And it'll take him like 45 minutes because he stands there with that checklist and he hits every single thing, every time. It'll stand out in 20 degree cold in pre flight. The damn thing in the snow. Yeah. What's the average guy gonna do after he has his license and the helicopters on the ramp and it's 10 degrees outside? Yeah. Or girl, how good is the pre flight gonna really be? Yeah. Have I ever got laxed? At times I have. There's times I've get, I've gotten laxed and then, then I have to kick myself in the butt and go, hey, you know what? Practice what you preach. It's easy when you're flying an aircraft and especially like say you're the only one flying it. Like when I have the instrument here for six months, I'm pretty much the only one that flies it.

Yeah.

If somebody even was going to do a solo or something or working on a rating, I'm here supervising. So it'd be easy for me to get laxed and go, oh well, nobody else has flown it. But that's the wrong attitude. I need to walk over there each time especially got a beautiful hangar, you know, a helicopter palace that we have here. There's no reason for me not to take the time to walk over there and walk around that entire aircraft and hit every single thing that on that aircraft that we need to check. Because yeah, I flew it yesterday and it was fine.

Yeah.

But what changed since I flew it last? Or maybe it's a week ago.

Absolutely.

What kind of puddles on the floor, you know, what's. What might have cracked Just because sometimes stuff just cracks.

Yeah.

You can get a crack in a frame or an exhaust system or.

Especially nowadays. Well, not nowadays, but this time of year you've got a lot of temperature changes. It's in a nice warm hangar. Then you pull it outside and it gets cold. You know, that plastic becomes very brittle, it can crack and hoses can snap off and things like that.

Yep.

So yeah, kind of part of pre flight and I only bring this up and I just thought of this while we were talking, but if you look at the pts, the very last section or the item that the examiner is supposed to check you on is post flight procedures that involves, you know, a post Flight walk around. And I teach all my students, once you get done, it's not, you know, once the blades are stopped spinning, it's not time to just walk away. Walk around the helicopter and see if there's anything that's missing. Then you know, maybe you can see a belt that's come off or you know, you're missing a screw here or there or something like that. That way when you go back to pre flight, you can fix it, you know, or get the mechanic to come over and look at it before it flies next. So I think a good post flight is almost as important as a pre flight. Even though we don't have a checklist for the post flight. But you can almost use your pre flight checklist as a post flight. You know, every time I flew in the military post flight, you know, inspection afterwards when I'm renting an aircraft from a school, I always want to do a post flight. One, make sure I, you know, nothing's missing. But two, this is more of a thing for me is I don't want the school or the next pilot to blame me for something that, that they caused or something like that, you know. So if I don't see it on the post flight, guess what? I didn't cause it. So I don't know.

Those are the kinds of things we talk about. Helicopter, land, ground school and I talk about all the time. All through my ratings, private, commercial, cfi. I don't remember everybody talking about post flight. And then when I was new CFI go down to maintenance. One time I'm hanging out with a mechanic and he, he's from a mechanic and this guy was been doing it forever, like probably 40 years. He was the first one that said to me and I don't remember ever hearing it before that. He's the one that said, I think you learn more from post flight than you do pre flight.

Absolutely.

He's the first one that really honed that in with me. And I thought he's right because you look at it prior to going to fly an hour later, you've been out working that thing hard. Maybe you've been doing autos or whatever it is you're doing in that hour of flight time or half hour flight time, what came loose, what cracked, what started leaking. So yeah, by it can be as simple as you roll it back in a hangar and take five minutes.

It doesn't take long at all.

Flip open the cowlings, just look inside. Is anything dripping down? You know, especially after autos or full down autos. Look at that landing gear. We had one. I'm at a busy flight school and I go to work one day and we had two helicopters and I see somebody, the owner's son, out messing with the landing gear. And I'm like. And he didn't say anything to me, right? I'm the pilot on duty. And I'm like, what's he doing? And I see him carrying something out the door. And so I walk over and look and part of the lane, one of the struts has gone off the landing gear. And I'm like. And I step back and I look at it and it's like the whole landing gear is like this. I mean, it is freaking like this. And I stood back in amazement. And so I called the owner and go, hey, man. And he's like, oh, I don't know what you know, I hate to say too many details because I don't want to name the people, but the owner comes in and blows up and it's like, who was the last person to fly it? The last person to fly it swore up and down that they didn't do it.

Yeah.

How do you do that much damage to a landing gear and not know it?

Right?

So it may be something that's very simple that a person did or did not do, or it might be actual. What's the word I want to use? Almost criminal, but not criminal. But it might be a person wrecked it, damaged it and they're too scared to fess up and they just park it and leave and walk away. And if you didn't, you walk in and you didn't do a good pre flight, then you go flight and you come back and then you get blamed for it because your pre flight wasn't good. Fess up. If you tear up the helicopter, it's hard to do. It's very hard. You had an over temp or you over pulled the power. It is hard to go back to your flight school or your instructor or the owner. That's a tough thing to do, to go back and go, man, I just messed up. What'd you do? I over pulled the power. How much? How much did you pull over? How far did you pull? Pull over? In the end you're going to be respected as a pilot because you fessed up over something you did. If you don't tell somebody, then the mechanic doesn't have an opportunity to look at it. And then the next person goes out and flies and has a failure because something you did, then that's on your conscious conch. Can't say it. That's on your mind that you know, that accident could have prevented because you're the one that did the damage to the aircraft, didn't notify anybody and the next pilot has a failure because you didn't fess up.

Yeah, I do that all the time when I, I don't, I don't.

Well, I don't fess up.

But you know, a good point of bringing that up is, you know, when I go out and do autos with a student, when I get back, one of the things I look at is the rotor head, make sure that I didn't bend something, you know, something's not the way it's not supposed to be because you know, if I got a student, you know, the next guy, it's the training school, right. So if the student doesn't catch it on his pre flight the next time because he's not really that proficient and the instructor doesn't look at it, they could go up and it could, it could kill them. So it's, it's very important that you know, you keep stuff like that in mind, especially if you're doing stuff that's not normal everyday type stuff. Yeah, I go and do off airport stuff. I always come back and check out everything, you know, just because I, it looks like I cleared my tail and the bushes are flying around. You know, out in Vegas we get lots of rocks and bushes and stuff like that. Who knows, maybe I picked up a rock and it dinged the road, the tail rotor or something like that. And that might be something that I need to get addressed. We made it back but you know, the next guy might not catch that. So yeah, it's on you to do that.

So random, random thought, bird strike, that's in the FAA lessons learned. I'm going to do a video on bird strikes the next thing. Next one, the next ones I'm going to do next year because I'm doing any more videos this year?

No, this is the last one.

This is the last one. No more videos this year but I'm going to do one on that. On that. Bird strikes. I've only had one that I remember in 20 years and I didn't know it happened and it was flying to BK117. At night. We land at a hospital. Medical crews inside do my walk around as we're supposed to, right? You land, get the crew there safely, they go inside with the patient. You stay with the aircraft to monitor the aircraft, security the aircraft and you walk around and check it. I walk around and I actually climb up on a cowling. And I'd had a bird strike hit a cowling, but it gave me the opportunity to check and make sure nothing was ingested into the air inlets, make sure there was no damage, everything was fine. I flew back, reported to the mechanic, and the aircraft wasn't even damaged. But I had a bird strike. Didn't even know I had a bird strike. But I wouldn't have caught it if I wouldn't climb up there and looked. And then how stupid would I look if I take it back and put the helicopter away and the next pilot comes in and goes, oh, nice bird strike you had last night.

Yeah.

What? Yeah, you didn't see the, the, you didn't climb up last night. Check it before you flew back from wherever you were, did you? Right. So post flight and pre flights, keep yourself alive, number one. One and then all the other reasons. Safety of other people, not getting blamed for something you didn't do.

Yeah.

Fess up to something you did do.

Absolutely.

All right, well, this is going along pretty good. Heather, do you got any questions you want to bring up for us or should we keep going? All right, all right. Okay, so we did the hover pre takeoff chat. You talked about pre flight. How about let's go to respecting instructors personal time. Do you want to cover this one or you want me to do it?

Sure. I bring this up because my wife brought this up last night.

We were discussing this at supper and I have a.

So every Monday is date night. So that's, that's most my students know it and stuff like that. But every once in a while I'll get a guy that wants to fly with me on Monday and I say, no, I can't, can't do it. And usually, like I said, my students know and they'll be like, oh yeah, I forgot. But every once in a while I'll get a guy and he's like, well, I'm only in town for a certain amount of time and I really want to get this done or anything. And I'm like, nope, dude, I can't do it. I'm too busy. I only have one day that I can basically do anything with her. So that's kind of it. But there are other times where, you know, I've been flying all day, you know, on the weekends I'll get up at 4 o' clock in the morning, I'm out at the airport at 5, 5, 30, and I'll fly until 7 or 8 at night, you know, and I'LL get somebody that says, oh, man, I want to fly with you at 10 o'. Clock. I'm like, oh, sorry, one. That's too many hours. I can't do that. But, you know, it's. Instructors need time off too, just like students. We're not machines.

Exactly. And it's like me now, where, you know, for years I work seven days a week, and sometimes I even do now, depending what's going on. But weekends, I kind of want to myself. And I have all the time people say, well, hey, you fly Saturday, you fly Sunday. And I say no. And they'll get. And they get frustrated. And it's like, my daughter's 16 years old, almost 17 years old. In a year or two, she might be off on her own. And in two, until she's off and living her own life, I want to have my weekends at home with her. And I get people emailing and asking oddball questions all times of day and night. And it's like. And then sometimes I get, you know, they're not. They get frustrated, but I don't answer right away. It's like, well, you said that to me at 2am on Saturday. And then, you know, maybe I got plans with my daughter all day. Right. And so we do work hard. And the thing that we discussing during that is you said a lot of your students are very respectful of that, very respectful of it. And HOGS members are the same way, and my students are the same way. Most people are respectful of it. But we also talked about, on the same token, how much time we give away as instructors. A lot of the time. And many instructors will agree with us on this. Like we were talking when your wife was present, we might say, you know, our intention is, well, I'm gonna go fly for an hour, I'll be back in two. Yeah, that's not even gonna really work.

Five hours later, I come home.

Five hours or you come home and I do the same thing. Where your intention is to go fly with somebody for an hour. An hour flight turns into four hours.

It does.

If you're going in to meet one person, you know, even if you tell somebody like, hey, okay, I'll come in on Saturday, I meet you too, but go ahead and pre. Pre flight, get fuel, get the aircraft ready to go.

Yep.

So when I get there, we can do a quick look over and talk what we're gonna do and go fly. You get to the airport and there's Joe Blow in the lobby telling stories with everybody else, and you go, oh, hey, you all Pre flight and fueled and everything. Oh, no, I haven't been out there yet. Okay. That's not respectful of our time when we're gonna come and kind of help you out when you want to fly, when you're a brand new student. We don't ask you to do that, that. But let's say you're an advanced pilot and you're working on advanced rating and you're fully capable of pre flighting and fueling the aircraft. Do that kind of stuff on your own. And if you have an agreement with us that we're going to fly at this time, get to the airport early, do the pre flight, get the fuel and those little things, you know, help us out because we do give back. Yeah, we give a lot of our time that we don't bill for. It'll end up being a four hour block and you go, God, I, I don't feel right charging that guy for three hours. Maybe it's partially his fault or partially our fault. But no, normally it's because they were messing around and then they want to stand around and suck up our knowledge that we've gained over the last 20 years and then they complain when you bill them for it. So be not only respectful of instructors time, but understand helicopters aren't cheap. And I have gotten personally frustrated over time with, get tired of people whining, it's expensive. It's hands down expensive. Instructors need to make their money. And if you're gonna whine about how much it costs, then we don't, I personally don't want to hear it anymore. Yeah, if you can't, if you can't afford it, don't do it.

Right.

Yeah, sorry.

No, no, absolutely.

They're hands down expensive. It ain't never going away. The insurance is horrible, the maintenance is horrible. It's just plain expensive. So most flight schools, I am a firm believer most flight schools are just trying to pay the bills.

That's it.

Most of them, they're not getting rich. The owner's not setting up in a big mansion on the hill. They're legitimately trying to put a price where they can generate money to pay for everything they got to pay for and hopefully profit at the end of the day. Something. And there's nothing wrong with profit.

Yeah.

An operator deserves to profit and put some money back in the bank for the efforts of what they have.

Yeah. Offered allows them to grow, to buy a newer helicopter to upgrade the existing helicopters. They can't do that without the profit. So it's, it is what it Is. I mean, it.

It's. It's why the thing we were discussing amongst ourselves was this is the problem with a lot of schools or companies. Either way, the money's not good. So they start skimping.

Yeah.

And nobody in the end is going to win because the company's not charging enough. People don't want to pay. And then eventually the end school ends up going out of business anyway. A school needs to charge what they need to charge to cover their expenses and to have their maintenance done. And their maintenance done. Right.

Correct.

And many times, depending on the. On the model of helicopter that you're flying, you might have mechanic that's close. Good. And does a great job for you. Yeah. A lot of times that's not the case. A lot of time we're calling a mechanic that's four hours away or two hours away, or we know a mechanic who's good and we trust. But that mechanics got a flying job and you call him up and you can't get him for a week. There's so many times behind the scenes of trying to maintain an aircraft and maintain it properly. Takes time, takes money, takes having a maintenance good guy that's close or a maintenance girl, someone that you can. That's in your area that's close. That can take care of that model.

Yep.

That's why we. We have to charge what we have to charge.

Yep.

All right, I better move on. Half the people are probably gone after that rant. But I'm just saying it's. It's an expensive business.

It really is.

And, you know, people are just trying to make a living. We all want to, you know, know make our house payment and have a little cash at the end of the day to have a beer, you know. All right, so we didn't look, we didn't hit. We did what they do wrong after their license. What's one good thing they do after getting their license before we go to the next thing?

Sure. So I've got a guy and this. This kind of goes back on what we said about staying up on your knowledge or anything. I have a guy that I routinely, every month fly instrument approaches with.

Nice.

And. And he calls me up, you know, he's like, hey, when do you have an open time? You know, and we usually do it at night, too. So it rehacks his night currency as well.

Nice.

And we'll go out and, you know, we'll do his three takeoff or his three approaches. We'll do some holding and stuff like that. And he flies his own Personal. His own personal aircraft, and he flies around the country all the time, and that's something that I think is very good. He's taken on his own training, you know, and say, you know, I understand that the requirements are every six months, you know, but he wants to do it every month. So he is, you know, way proficient at flying these approaches. And so. And he always has me teaching him something new, you know, so he was wanting to stay up on the reg. So he's always texting me or calling me and asking me questions and stuff like that. That's what you need to do. And he does. He's not a professional pilot. That's not what he does. But he wants to stay safe, and he does.

And he can do that. And he can get himself home. If he went inadvertent imc, he's comfortable flying instruments and he can do it.

Yep, absolutely.

Either he files IFR and does it, or he calls for help and he flies himself back in, saves his own life because he was current and comfortable.

And he knows his limitations. You know, we always talk about personal minimums and, you know, just because he's. He's an airplane guy, but even though he's got an IFR capable aircraft and he files all the time and he flies through weather, he still knows his limitations and he won't fly through weather. That is not good for him because he knows what his own personal limits are. So I think that's huge.

Awesome. Well, we'll keep rolling here because we've got a couple other things to hit and Heather's got to leave a little bit, so we'll roll on here a little farther. Let's see. I almost titled the video this. This topic today. And then I thought, okay, maybe it's over the top for some people, but this is what we came up with last night. It's one of the first things we talked about. If your instructor sucks, move on. And I just put it in that term. We hear this all the time, and people email me all the time, and that's okay, right? We're here to help you, and here we're here to answer your questions.

Yep.

People are hesitant. You have one instructor. You've been flying with that instructor, and it's very common. I get an email when somebody has somewhere around 15 to 20 hours and their instructor moves on and they're lost and they're upset and they don't know what to do. That case, you know, you find an instructor and you move on. But. But the one if your instructor sucks Move on. We also get so many complaints. And, you know, instructor's not doing ground school, or instructor's doing this, or the attitude of the instructor, the way they treat a person, it is your money. You're paying the flight school, you're paying that instructor. If in your heart, in your gut, you don't feel like you're being treated properly either, number one, you confront them, and you do it politely. But just say, confront that school or that instructor with your problem. If it's a bigger school, ask to fly with somebody else. And I realize this is difficult. It's not always easy in these situations, but it is your money. And if you don't think this instructor cares about your money or your rating, or you don't like the way this instructor treats you, you should always be treated with respect. Right? An instructor needs to hone your skills and help you and point out your deficiencies and help you clear up those problems. But he or she needs to do that in a method that is stern but still comfortable. We have to make the point to you. Like, look, if you do that, you're going to kill yourself. Okay? So let's, let's work on that. And I, and I don't want to see you do that again. You know, it's our job, instructors, to train you well, but it's our job to train you and treat you the way you want to be treated. Jumping anytime I'm trying to think of.

What I want to say is, we talked earlier about respecting the instructor's time. Well, the instructor needs to respect your time, too. So if, you know, if they're showing up, you know, we talk about the student showing up, being prepared and ready to go. The instructor needs to do the same thing. If he's not showing up and he's not prepared, he doesn't know what he's going to teach you and things like that. That's not good either. So it's not an effective use of your time. It's not. Especially if you're paying for it. You know, if you, if you're paying for the instructor to sit there and review stuff in the handbook that he could have done before you showed up or something like that, then that's not good either.

You're right. It's the instructor's job to be there, be prepared, Be prepared for you have whatever you're gonna do for that day, your instructor should be there and have these things planned out and ready to go and the materials he needs to have there. If he's running off, oh, Sorry, my stuff's not here. I gotta run to the car and oh hey, I gotta go make a phone call. Oh hey, his girlfriend's texting him or her boyfriend texting her or whatever the case is.

You know, I'll bring this up and I'm not, I'm not calling out. Well, maybe I will call him out.

But no need to, no need to get anybody frazzled.

No, no, no, he's a good instructor, he means well. But one of my instructors, I watched him, he was doing, he was helping out with some initial CFI training and I sat in or I happened to walk by and we had a window in our door and I could see him in there and the student was up teaching and he's sitting there playing on his phone. And I was like, that's absolutely uncalled for, you cannot do that. I mean he had no idea what the student was talking about or anything like that. And obviously he was no longer working with that student, you know, but, but that is something we had to have a hard conversation with that instructor about. And you know, I told the student, I was like, dude, you can't, you know, if he's doing stuff like that, don't, that's not, that's not acceptable. Let us know. Let me know as the chief pilot, let you know somebody in the school know, tell him, dude, that's not respecting my time, you know, at the most. And so yeah, so that kind of stuff really chaps me. It drives me nuts. So don't, don't accept a subpar instructor.

Yes. So, and in my mind, I think it was two of us doing dual or get receiving duel for our commercial or cfi. I think it was commercial. And we're getting a split rate. Like, you know, I'm paying half and he's paying half. But the guy I'm with, he worked for a business, he has business radio on and we're doing ground for an hour at a time and he's going, yeah, yeah, use the 12 inch PVC on that. And yeah, I mean ground, but you know, then five minutes later he's on his radio again. And so I went to the instructor after the fact and said, dude, I'm. I realize you're giving me a discount rate, but I'm not doing ground if this guy's gonna be on his frickin radio talking, you know, the boss plumbing job. That's bullshit. Mm. And same with a student. If I'm sitting down doing ground with you, I get frustrated. If a student students on there even if you're paying me. Oh, hang on. I hate that.

Yeah.

If we're sitting down and whether we're going to do a half an hour ground or an hour ground, then let's do it. Yeah, I don't care if you're paying me not. I don't want you on your phone.

Right.

Either you listen to me or not. And same way with an instructor. Oh, I'm in here. An instructors texting while they're flying, doing duel. Have you heard this one? Yep, I've been hearing this quite a bit. A hogs member will email me and Kenny, I'm kind of frustrated because I'm flying duel with my instructor and my instructor's over there the whole flight texting and you know, and he's trying to get his instructor's attention and I'm like, okay, that's one where I'll say I'd be done.

Yep.

I would. You might give that instructor one chance, but I would give him one and one only. I would say, dude, either we're flying or we're not. If you're going to be texting, we're not flying ever. We're not flying anymore. Together. I'm going to go get another instructor. I would not put up for one minute an instructor texting while flying. That instructor is there to help train you and the instructors there to supervise you as you're honing your skills. And if that guy or girl is on their phone texting when they're with you doing duel, I would not put up with that for a second.

Nope. No. Completely unacceptable. So.

So bottom line, it's your money. Kind of along that lines we discussed last night. How. How does a person know when you're new to it, you've only got 10 hours. You've got 15 hours, you got 20 hours and you go, well, how do I know whether I'm getting quality instruction? And the thing I think I said to you was, I think a little bit has to be gut instinct. A little bit has to be you as the student. Look at the total picture and how do you really feel about it? Do you? Do you. If you legitimately feel in your heart that there's a problem here, then it's probably legitimate. It is hard as a 10 hour, 15 hour, 20 hour student, 30 hour student. It is hard to understand and know. I guess you ask around, you check referrals or you check testimonials for a company we understand.

And with social media we got nowadays there's all kinds of groups and blogs and stuff like that and people are always spouting their, you know, their own opinions and stuff out there, but that's also a good spot. Hey, you know, how many hours it take you to solo? How many hours it take you to solo? You know, you'll find the average. And if you're, well, exceeding that or if, you know, then maybe it's. Could be. You could be the instructor. But, you know, you can have a kind of a rough gut. You know, most people are pretty good care, you know, judges of character, too.

Sure.

So, you know, if. If your instructor is blowing you off a lot and things like that, then. Yeah, it's probably not.

You schedule a flight at a different school. Yeah. And just. And make it nonchalant. Call another school and say, hey, I know I'm a student and I got about 20 hours or so, but I'd like to come check out your flight school, and I'd like to fly with one of your instructors for an hour, because I'd like a change of pace. You don't have to call up and say, hey, I'm frustrated with the guy. I'm flying with a girl. And I don't know. You don't even have to say that. Go fly with someone else in a different environment. And then. And then after that hour, you'll go, wow, my first instructor's not so bad, because this guy sucks. Or you might go, wow, that was a totally different experience. This instructor was doing things for me that this guy hasn't been doing. Go fly with somebody else. This does boil back to the people don't want to change the structures. They never do. Yeah, they never want to change. And we've. I push personally all the time. Fly with different instructors, fly different aircraft. You're flying to Robinson. Go do a Cadbury lesson. You're flying to Cadbury. Go do an instrument lesson. You. When we agree on this, we've been discussing this one, we learn every time that we fly, and every new student we meet, we learn as instructors. We learn from all of you. We learn from everybody we fly with. We learn new techniques. We learn things that we've never heard before, and we go, oh, I think I'm gonna try that technique. Sometimes. We might even change. Even though I've taught something 20 years this way, I'm like, you know what? I gave that a chance, and I like that. I'm gonna adopt that. So don't be afraid to fly with different instructors. Don't be afraid to go to different flight schools. I'm gonna go look at the camera. Camera here. That was basically kind of weird. Oh, we're about to lose battery. Well, hey, Awesome. We're gonna lose our battery here, so I guess I'm gonna have to wrap it up. I didn't mean. I didn't want to wrap it up, but if I change batteries on the camera, I don't know if we'll keep the feed live. Let's try it. Let's try it. I'm gonna go grab a battery. All right, check. Cool.

And I'll keep talking because I'm here by myself. Absolutely, absolutely. Yep, yep. I 100% agree, but never done this before.

Change the battery on the camera while we were live and see if the feed will stay. All right, we're gonna try.

If not, will it go to hers?

Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Yeah, yeah, we could bring up your. You could chit chat. Chit chat with me for a minute there. Ask them, read us some comments.

Yeah, Well.

Can you guys hear me while they're changing the battery? Comment if you can. It's on me right now. Just my audio.

Let's do a little test here.

Daniel says he can hear me. Dark here. Go ahead and go back. We're going to cut back to the.

Let us know. That's the first time I've successfully changed a battery while live, I believe.

Just like we were saying, go fly with another school. We've, you know, in Vegas, we. We see that quite a bit. I'm sure the other schools don't necessarily.

I don't know.

I think it's good, though, because, you know, we'll. I want students to come and tell us, hey, I had this experience at this school or had this experience at that school, it makes us a better school. Just like, you know, if they had a bad experience with us, hopefully it makes, you know, the school that they do end up at, hopefully it makes them better, too, because all we really, at the end of the day, I just want everybody to have the best training possible.

Absolutely.

We want you to be safe pilots. So kind of like we were saying, every rating I've ever done has been with a different Instagram instructor. So I try not to do. And I do that mainly to learn new techniques and to learn different teaching styles. Some I've really enjoyed flying with. Others I just wanted to get through the race so I can get back to, you know, a better instructor. But, you know, at the same time, if at any point I had an issue with that instructor, yeah, I'd fire him, you know, so.

That's right.

Of course I Say that a couple of my instructors I had were when I was in college. And I can't really fire my college professor. So you might just be stuck with what you got. But if at all possible, even in that situation, we had students that couldn't fly with a certain instructor. Their personalities just didn't mesh and so they got the school to change them over to another instructor. So if you're having something like that at a big school, talk with the chief pilot. Yeah, see, see what you can do.

Don't be afraid to change.

No.

Fly with different instructors. Fly different flight schools. Fly different aircraft. Absolutely. Well, let's hit these other couple things that we had for our hangar talk again. This is stuff we came up with last night. And I said, oh, there's a good one here. Let's put that in the phone. Yep, this is, this is for you, Dan, because you brought this up and you have first hand knowledge of this with what your examiner is stating about the new flight plan.

Yeah, so like I said, readers are coming up with topics. So we had an examiner that I sent a guy for his instrument check and at the end the examiner's like, yeah, he did really well, but he had no idea about the new flight plan format. So back in November, if you didn't realize this, we changed over. So no more of the domestic FAA flight plans. We're all on the ICAO flight plans now. And there are some new equipment codes. It incorporates ADS B and GPS and different things like that. So you actually need to look up and see what your aircraft is capable of having and file it properly. Now, most of the services that you're going to use to file this. So you know the three big ones are going to be 1800wxbrief.com or just call the weather briefer and they've got nice tutorials and stuff like that that can step you through it. The FAA's got a good web page that talks about the new flight plan as well. It's not anything too crazy, but it is something that you need to be aware of, especially when you're going into your checkride. Your examiner might ask you that because it's part of the pre flight planning piece. So make sure you guys are reviewing that as well. So.

Okay, and another one, pretty important. And I know Brian Rutledge and I have been discussing this recently and then you and I discussed it last night. Instructors and rated pilots asking us questions that they should be looking up on their own. Yep. And we're not saying that because we don't want to answer people's questions. That's not what we're saying. When you're a student, we're going to ask you questions and we're going to want you to look things up. We don't mind answering your questions. With that being said, let's say you're. Let's use example of you're going for a private pilot rating or no, I'm sorry, you're a private pilot and you're going for your instrument rating. You're asking us, well, how many hours do I have to have? What do I have to do for that? And I'm just giving an example. We get bombarded with questions that we feel like we don't always want to say this, but I'm gonna say it right now. You need to know how to look stuff up. You learned that as a private pilot. Okay. When you're going for that advanced rating, the examiner may very well say, what did you have to do to get ready today to apply for this additional rating? Oh, let me ask my instructor. No, you have to say, Well, I needed 20 hours of dual, I need additional 10 of solo, and there's some cross countries that I had to do. But I looked him up in the far aim with my instructor. I have those tab for you in my logbook. So. So many times we get questions and I'm not even really saying, you know, I'll be honest, it's YouTube, right? Well, I'm a rated pilot and I'll get CFIs asked like, oh, I'm a double I in a helicopter or an airplane fixed to me. What's it take for the helicopter add on, Right?

Yeah.

Pretty easy to flip that up and find that 20 hours and 10 hours. And I'm not gonna answer on YouTube. I'm not gonna go through the whole ball of wax of what you got to do to do an add on. You need to go look it up. And my. Am I coming off wrong here?

No, I don't.

I'll let you.

Yeah. So what I get at my school, since I'm the chief instructor, most guys will come, come and ask me questions and what I'll usually do is I'll turn it around and say, where would you find that? And you know, especially if it's a question where, you know, it's a basic knowledge question or something like that, if I can get them to say, well, I'd look that up in the aim, or I'd look that up in part 91 or part 61 or something. Okay, cool. If they're coming to me with a specific, legitimate question, like, hey, I read this in the Instrument Flying Handbook, but I don't quite understand how this system works. Can you explain it to me? Now, I'm engaged, and I will help you, but if you say, you know, hey, what? You know, somebody comes to me and says, hey, what are the parts of the ILS system? And I'm gonna be like, dude, you can look that up. You know, you can look in the handbook. I'm not just gonna spit it out for you. One, because you're gonna need to know it, because they're probably gonna ask it on your checkride. And if I just give you the answer, it's not helping. You know where it's at. So because that happens on the checkride, you're gonna ask the examiner, no, you're gonna not have to know where it's at. So a lot of times, if it's. If it's something very specific where you just need amplifying information, then yes. But if it's just a basic type question because you don't want to look it up, I'm not gonna help you with that. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna turn the question on you and make you try and figure it out.

So we train you as private pilots. We want you to learn to look stuff up. The more you either you refer to the FAR AIM on your mobile device or you look it up in the FAR AIM manual. You need to be good at it to where it's just a flow and you don't even think about it. And the checkride examiner, you go, oh, man, I just read that the other day, but, oh, yeah, I looked at that. 9157. I got it right here. Okay. But if he asks you the question, you go, well, I think I know that. Well, where could you look that up? And you go, oh, yeah, pretty sure it's in the FAR aim. No, no, no, no, no. No examiner wants to know that you know how to use that Far AIM or any manual. You know where to go to get that question. And if your oral checkride's going good and you had one little. One little flub up, no big deal. And you go, I just read it, and I can tell you exactly where it's at. He's going to go, okay, cool. Show me. Open it up. Show him. Your examiner is going to be happy that, okay, you've been doing really well. You had one little hiccup there, but you knew exactly where to go to find that answer, nine out of 10 examiners are going to be happy with that. There might be the one that says, no, you can't look that up.

But, yeah, I haven't seen that too often.

Nine out of ten, they're gonna go, good for you. A good pilot uses his resources.

Absolutely. And while you're looking something up, you might learn something else, too, as you're scrolling through, trying to find something. So, yeah, it's a. It's a good way to learn.

All right, well, we've hit everything we had in the, in the list, with exception of notam specifically, but you kind of mentioned that.

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, knowing what, what different things, you know, so getting an actual. I've had the guys come to me for their, their initial CFI training and I ask them where they get the notams, and they're like, oh, it's on foreflight, or, you know, I'm gonna call the weather briefer. And they had no idea. There's an actual website for just plain notes. You can type in and get the actual notams. You don't have to go through the whole system, but understanding what those give you, where to find the published notams, things like that, and why they're so important. So, you know, if you're going to do an instrument checkride, for instance, we have this at North Las Vegas right now. Our ILS's noted them out of service, or at least it was before I came here. But, you know, if you're going to plan on doing an instrument checkride, and the examiner is like, oh, okay, so tell me about all this kind of stuff. And he knows, because he checked the notams, that the ILS is out of service. And then you go to step to the airplane, you start it up to go out and do the. Start your flight. He's going to say, dude, how are we going to do the ils? Oh, we'll do it here. Well, dude, it's not service. How are you going to do that type thing? So. But that's, that's important type stuff. I've seen, you know, we're lights have been notam'd out and, you know, pilots have gone on across country and they get to where they're going and they find out that, hey, I can't turn on the lights. Why not? Because they're noted out, which he should have known before he took off.

Yep.

So, yeah, hugely important.

We'll start wrapping it up. I'll give Heather a chance to check. Get ready to give any questions before we See what questions she's got left. We're gonna wrap it up pretty quick because she's got to go very shortly and she's monitoring those questions. Holiday sale ends tomorrow night. There's a link right down below the video for our holiday special. You can get all the details down there. I'm not going to bore you with it right now. Right below this video special link shows the countdown timer. What time is left on our holiday special. Go below to check that out. What? Do you have any last minute questions for us before we go?

I don't see any real questions, just a lot of awesome comments. Everybody's saying happy New Year, guys. Hi, Kenny. Hi, Taz. Thanks for all the real life schooling and work that goes in getting in all together for us and cheers. That's about it.

All right, we'll get wrapping up then. New Year's Eve. Everybody else got, you know, things they want to do. Maybe tonight, maybe not. Thanks, dan. Taz Christman, 2018 Flight Instructor of the year and author of the Amazon number one bestseller top ten checkride Tips. Okay. Co. Authored. We're both Amazon number one best selling offers authors. We're not drinking yet, but it is offered on Amazon. It is on Amazon as well. But it'll cost you less money if you go right to helicopterground.com. it'll cost you less than if you go to Amazon to get it.

Absolutely.

So we're proud of that book. It's there for you. Go check out the holiday special. Thanks to all of you. We. I'm sure there's a ton of comments and we push them. Ate them all. But if we got trying to acknowledge everybody, then, you know, that gets. That gets old too. And so we're gonna wrap it up. We gotta thank every single Hogs member, man. And even YouTube viewers and everyone. Yeah, Dan's been saying it. I believe he goes, Dude, Hogs 2020 is going to be.

It's gonna be great.

It's gonna be even better. And it does. Each year, it just keeps growing.

Yep.

I don't know what else to say other than thanks to all of you that stayed with us and we're now a force to be reckoned with in the helicopter industry. Did I just say that? Hell yeah, I did. I built it on my own without really any help and I'm pretty proud of that. And now we got some people wanting to jump on the Hogs bandwagon and that's okay because now I'm gonna say prior to this, you didn't want anything to do with me, and all sudden, now you all want them on my coattail. What you gonna do for me? Just saying a little bit of the smart ass. Kenny. He's got to come out then. All right, let's wrap it up. You have our picture ready to go up. Everybody have a safe New Year's Eve tonight. Stay home, Uber Lyft cab.

Yep.

There's your choices. Do not blow your helicopter career by going out tonight.

And not worth it.

Getting yourself in trouble.

Yep.

Not be worth it at all.

It's not worth it and it endangers everybody else.

So come, come wave bye. Heather, love, see your face.

Bye, everybody.

Happy new year.