Helicopter Jobs & Training Aircraft July 31

Hello, this is Kenny Keller with Fort Wayne Helicopters and the creator Helicopter Online Ground School. Thanks for stopping by. Another one of our question and answer daily live broadcast question today is a good one and question from one of our free members in our online ground school site. I have a private rating on a Schweitzer 300 CBI in 2010. Now I'm planning to do my commercial training. If I do my commercial on deck, different helicopter, is that going to be a problem with getting a job or getting the rating? This is a great question and it doesn't really get asked a lot. Maybe sometimes people don't think enough about this one in the beginning. And there's two big sides to this. Depending on where you're going to try to get your first job at, you may just be willing to go anywhere or maybe you want to work at a specific flight school in a specific aircraft. So the big thing is when you go to get your first job, they're going to want to know how much helicopter time do you have and how much helicopter time in specific aircraft do you have? If you're trying to get a job on an R22 and you've only got 20 hours in the R22, that's not going to happen. There's certain regulations on the amount of time you have to have in the R22 to teach or if you're going to fly in the Sweitzer or the instrument, depending on where you go. Things are going to be different with different flight schools and the example I want to give. For four years I was operating in Enstrom with a flight school and the first insurance company I had for the first three years I battled with them constantly because I would train a guy, private commercial cfi, and I'd want to put him on the insurance and they'd say, well, have him get, you know, a total of 350 hours and then 250 in F28F. And I would be really frustrated and say, what are you talking about? I trained the guy, he's familiar with my operation, my aircraft. And it was a very, very frustrating situation because who knows, better my aircraft than my operation, than somebody that I trained and did all their ratings with me. So I battled with that the whole time. And I was actually a Czech airman for that insurance company and I still am today. But I didn't have any say or pull in getting someone insured. Then I changed in my last year and the company I changed to, not only did they save me a little bit of money, they were Very reputable. But they said, you hire who you want, we'll insure who you want. You're the instructor. Why should an insurance underwriter tell you who can safely operate your aircraft? And I was amazed. And I thought, wow, I wish I'd been using you guys three years ago, because that's the way it should be. So those are the kind of scenarios that you're gonna get into is how much time you got to have in that specific aircraft. What is the insurance going to require? Everything in this industry, like everything else is, is pretty much regulated by insurance. So that is going to be the main thing as far as getting your rating. You know, would it make it tougher if you did Switzer first and then you switch to another aircraft? I personally think the benefits outweigh the fact that it might cost you a little more money and might take you a few more hours to get that commercial rating. Switch into a different aircraft. But flying different aircraft is good. It takes you a little more time, you'll spend a little bit more money. But it's sure nice to get training and instruction in different styles of aircraft from different instructors. Because everybody has their own way of teaching. And two guys may teach the same maneuver, say a quick stop, and they might teach them totally different. And it doesn't mean one guy's wrong and the other guy's right. They could both be a good maneuver as long as it's performed safely. You know, there's a lot of benefit to flying those different aircraft and playing with different instructors and seeing the different ways people teach. So it's a pretty open ended question. There's lots of things to think about. Do you have a specific place that you're going to want to fly and a specific aircraft? If that's the case, then you're probably going to want to stick with that one aircraft. If you're going to be searching around again, it's just kind of. You got to kind of look at what's going to be right for you. And getting that first job sometimes is very, very tough. For most everybody, that first job is the tough one. And it's usually the problem is having the amount of time in the aircraft that you're trying to get that job to fly is you don't have enough time in that specific make and model of aircraft. So I know that it may not answer the question to a T is what most people would like it to be answered, but that's pretty much the case. It's a great thing to fly different aircraft, fly with different Instructors get different experiences. Different experiences. There's a lot of good involved in all that. But just knowing that it could cause you a little bit trouble later when you're going to get that first job, when you don't have enough time in that specific aircraft. So hopefully that kind of answers that question and gives you a little bit of insight on that. And as far as making it the rating harder, I don't think so. I mean, helicopters, they all have collectives, cyclics, pedals, they all fly virtually the same, virtually, but they're just, there are different characteristics, buttons and switches are different places. You have different limitations. So although there are differences, they're still helicopters. So again, bottom line, I want to sum it up with, in my training I did Robinson, Schweitzer, Enstrom, between off the street up till cfi. It did take me about four years to get there. It took a lot of extra money because when every time I'd switch to a different aircraft, I would have to kind of like back up and some things you kind of, not that you have to relearn anything, but you have to learn how to handle another aircraft differently and different emergency procedures and different performance things and so on. So I still think to this day for me, I'm glad I had that experience in the three different aircraft because it, it helped me just have a well rounded idea of kind of how all these different aircraft fly and, and traveling around and flying in about five or six different states with different instructors in the end was a really good thing. But it did cost me more money and, you know, did kind of delay the training. So these are all things that you want to think about when you're looking at what aircraft should I fly? Is it going to be hard to get the rating by switching to aircraft? And what about a job later? Hopefully that helps. Thanks for stopping by this video. Leave your questions in the box below. If you would like a specific helicopter training question or answered. You need a question answered about our helicopter online ground school? You can leave that in the box below as well. So thanks for stopping by and we'll see you tomorrow. Thanks.