Kenny Keller breaks down helicopter pilot training timelines. You need a minimum of 40 hours for your private license, but most people log 60 to 70. Training three times a week gets you there in a few months; once a week stretches it past a year. He took four years to reach CFI instructor level due to funding gaps.
Questions this video answers
40 hours minimum.
60 to 70 hours (average).
About three times a week.
Well over a year.
About four years.
Chapters
I wanted to make another video in response to another frequently asked question that is how long does the training take? Well, it's a really great question, but it's a really big question. There's a lot to that. You can't just throw a number out and say, oh, it's going to take you three months. Depends on what rating you're starting on first. And we'll use the private, for example. It all depends on how many times a week you're going to fly the best for training purposes and for your money, about three times a week. But the question again is how long is it going to take? So if you think about you schedule yourself one day a week, that's 40 hours minimum for the private pilot. Average guy does it in 60 to 70 hours. So if you do an hour a week, that's going to take you quite a long time. It's going to take you well over a year to ever get that rating. And you're not going to make good progress because you're only flying once a week. So the other part of it is you could fly too much if you flew every day, you get yourself overwhelmed, your flying would get ahead of the ground and again, that turns into a big mess too. So how long is the training going to take? It depends on how much time and effort you have to put into it, how good your study habits are, how good you are studying on your own, how much time do you have available. If you have family and you've got a job and you've got other commitments in your life, it's, it's going to be a little harder to really hit it super hard. So it all depends on how much time you have available to fly, how good you are at studying, how fast you progress through the training. And then you also have to remember there's always weather issues, there's times helicopter helicopters go down for maintenance. So you have to be smart in the training from the very beginning when you schedule a lesson. Another way to help get you through the training is when you, you still, you have bad weather that comes in going and do ground school. So there's so many different factors in the question of how long is it going to take. You can't really nail that down unless you know on how many days for sure you can commit to, to doing the flying and how much time you can commit to studying. And do you have all the funds available to you, which holds a lot of us back. It was, it took me about four years to get from off the street to cfi because I had to stop and try to scrounge up more money. And that's a lot of problem that a lot of us have is you don't have all the money to go through first time around. So you do your first private rating, then do your commercial, then maybe do the cfi. So again, money is an issue for most all of us, and that's just part of it. Hope that helps. And thanks for sending in the questions. I'll keep them coming. And if you enjoy this or helps you out and you like it, please hit the like button. And don't be afraid to leave comments or questions, good or bad feedback on what you think. And we'll go from there. So thanks everybody. We'll catch up with you soon.
