Kenny Keller (Fort Wayne Helicopters) explains why helicopters perform better in cooler, drier air—particularly in fall and winter—than on hot summer days. He notes heater comfort (can keep the cockpit warm even at zero outside) and operational adjustments: on hot training days they commonly carry about half fuel capacity because full tanks may prevent getting off the ground. He encourages flying in cooler seasons and invites comments/likes/shares.
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Kenny Keller (Fort Wayne Helicopters).
September 22, 2011.
About half the fuel capacity (they avoid full tanks on hot days for local training).
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Hello everybody, it's Kenny with Fort Wayne Helicopters. And I wanted to talk real quick about something that I think is pretty interesting and that surprises a lot of people that they don't really understand is they'll say, well, do you guys fly in the wintertime? Absolutely. We fly in the wintertime. Right now we're going into fall. Fall is a great time to fly. In the wintertime is actually even better. We are limited by bad weather days due to visibility and heavy snow and things like that. But as far as the helicopter goes, number one, they want to know about the heater. We have a great heater in the instrument that will toast you right out of there. It can be zero outside and we can be completely warm in the helicopter. But the bigger news is the helicopter performance in the fall and especially in the wintertime is really, really good. The helicopter really, truly loves the wintertime. The cooler air, the drier air is great for helicopter performance. So we love the summertime because we're flying with the doors off and the wind's blowing through and it's beautiful out. And summertime flying is awesome as well. But we're limited to the things we can do in the summertime. Like, a student will be surprised when you get to the point where you're letting them maybe put the fuel in or decide how much fuel and they go, oh, let's just top it off so we'll have extra fuel. And we, they're usually surprised when we say, no, we wouldn't be like, we won't even get off the ground in the summertime. On a hot day, if you're going out to just do training, we go about half the capacity on the fuel. We wouldn't, there is no way we would go with full tanks in the summertime unless you were leaving and going like on a cross country flight. But the helicopter performs so much better in the cooler weather. It's really, really unbelievable. So it's really a better time to fly just because it's so much easier on the aircraft. It's more comfortable being in there. The hot days, even though they're fun, it can be pretty miserable with, with not only the bad performance, but getting hot and sweaty and all that too. So anyway, I wanted to put out that quick little note about the performance of the aircraft. So if you're thinking about flying this fall or this winter, it's a great, great, great time to fly. So as always, thanks for stopping by. Please leave comments and feedback, Hit the like or the share button and we'll talk to you all soon. Thanks for stopping.
