Heliopter Pilot Training - Am I starting training too late at 47?

So here we go. Hey, It's Kenny with HelicopterGround.com and I want to answer a question from one of our possible members, someone looking at joining our ground school. He's been on watching us on social media for a while and he sent me a really nice email. And he was emailing me specifically because he knows that Gary I and Brian are all either cops or ex cops. Law enforcement. He's a law enforcement officer, 47 years old, about five years away from retirement, always wanted to get into helicopters. And he basically said, you know, he's going to be retiring around 52, wants to get in helicopters and wants to know if he's starting too late in life. And he's interested in flying tours, which is a great way to get started once you get the amount of hours you need in order to fly the tours. And he said, but then I'm wondering if later on I could fly EMS or fire and do you think I'm too old? So my first answer is, I don't think you're too old at all to learn to fly. As far as the EMS or fire goes, I'm not going to say you can't do it. Starting if you say, got out there commercially at 52 and started flying, you'd have to get 2,000 hours, which can take about five years. But there are guys flying EMS clear and they're into their 70s. So I know in the law enforcement job that this member is talking about, he has to retire at 60. So you could fly EMS and fire into your, you know, late 60s, early 70s pretty easily. You can get your rating. You know, one of our members got A rating at 72 years old in the Jet Ranger. So it's never too late to learn. So I would say go for it. At minimum, you could, you know, start now on the private, on your days off or whatever you could do, start work on the private. And if you could just fly tours by the time you retire, that alone would be awesome. Instructing is a lot of fun. I flew EMS for 5 years, but after 5 years I had enough. And many of the pilots that I run into, a lot of people get tired of EMS after five years or so. Every job turns into a job at some point. Some people love EMS and stay in it, some people get in it for three or four or five years and get out and move on. I personally have more fun now working as a CFI and getting out there and doing the CFI job. I enjoy that much more than I ever did flying ems. So do I think it's too late. No, I think you should get into it. Get your commercial, get your cfi, start instructing, do anything you can as soon as you can. And you know, there's always that option that you could fly EMS at some point. So I don't want to spoil anybody's dream. You could possibly still do it in your career if you would get the time. The normal EMS job takes about 2000 hours. Far as fire, I don't have any expense or any experience with the piloting jobs for fire suppression, so that I can't really go into because I just can't give you any details on that. And then of course, at last he said, how do people pay for it? Because he doesn't just have the money to just throw down and get all the training, which is a very common problem. That's the common problem for most anybody learning to fly helicopters. If you're going to get into it, you have to get into it because you know it's what you want to do. Not because you're gonna make a bunch of money or because you're gonna worry about the money you're gonna spend. It's expensive across the board. So how do people pay for it? They rob, beg, borrow, steal, get loans. The only loan option I can only think of right now is Pilot Finance. They've been around for a long time. I used them way back to get my help, get my commercial rating. And other than that, I use savings. I sold off stuff. My dad gave me some money. I used Pilot Finance. I did everything I could in order to get there. So the money is always the tough part of it. But if you, if you really want to do it, you can find the money. Please subscribe to our channel. Please give us a like on this and I want to give you a download for watching this video. Down below this video, in the description box, there's a link you can sign up to get a free free PDF copy of my Amazon bestseller Helicopter Checkride. And once you sign up, you'll see a link where you can go in and view our private commercial and cfi, everything that's in the training. And you'll also get a link sent to your email where you can go into our free section of our ground school site, look around, check out the video chapters of the book and read some of our member testimonials. And there's some other things you can look around in there and enjoy as well. Please subscribe to our channel. Please like give us a comment. Go to that download download button below and we'll see you in the next video.