"How to Determine the Best Helicopter Approach Angle?"

This next question is from Colleen, and they want to know the best way to determine your approach angle. Ooh. Ooh. That's a phenomenal question. You know what, we're gonna pull up a video for you and we'll put it in the list here that we'll show. Okay, so what I did, we got some lightly drawn lines on here. This is your ground level, and we had a line here. So we could use this and we could make our 5 degree, our 10 degree and our 15 degree and draw these out so that you can see them. So let's talk about that first simple little tool to actually figure 5 degrees. 10 degrees, 15 degrees. Okay? So that's how we know this is pretty darn close to what we're talking about on 5, 10, or 15. So if you're struggling with approaches, you need to nail the normal first. Okay, so I'm going to repeat this over and over. Shallow is 5, normal is 10, and a steep is 15. If you nail the normal first, then you know, you can judge later how to do a shallow and how to do a steep. And we've got another diagram to show you in the cockpit, and we're going to talk about it a little bit more down here on the bottom of the page. So checkride question, private commercial examiner can ask you, what's 5 or what's a normal? It's 10, what's a shallow? It's 5, what's a steep? 15. So if you look at this, a person can go visualize this, right? You have your helicopter up here. Here's where you are, here's where you're going to end up. This is a Runway. Here's the ground. Just take an overview and look at that. You can sit in the aircraft or be flying an approach in, and you can kind of judge, right? Like, let's go to the extreme. There's people out here being taught, like, they'll come here from wherever and I'll go show me a steep approach. And they'll come in here like 45 degrees. And I use the plotter again to draw this. That's 45 degrees. They'll. There are people that are legitimately coming here and somebody has taught them to fly a steep approach at 45 degrees. If somebody is teaching you that, I'm going to be nice. You've been taught wrong. If there's some reason that you got to try to get in a spot at 45 degrees, you're coming in way too damn steep. Okay, Helicopter Flying Handbook. This is standard equipped training in the U.S. shallow. 5 normal, 10 steep, 15 normal. Know those numbers. And again, you can visualize this, right? What is 5, what is 10, what is 15? Learn the normal first. Then you can build on what's it look like for shallow, what's it look like for steep? This is a phenomenal question. And people ask this all the time. Yeah. If you don't understand that approach angle, it causes you a lot of trouble, Right. And a lot of people struggle with this bottom line is a normal is 10 degrees. A shallow is 5 degrees, a steep is 15 degrees. So first you got to figure out that normal, right? And once you figure out normal and you're comfortable with where it's at, then you can build off that to figure out what your steep and your shallow is. And once you figure out the normal, then you can figure out where in the aircraft by the way you sit in it. Does it line with the top of the compass or the bottom of the compass or the top of your dash? So figuring out that 10 degrees is the first hard part. And, you know, if you can imagine. And again, I'll show it to you in the video, but, you know, if you can imagine looking for a blank piece of paper. But you know, one thing you can do, and we do this in the video, describe it. But, you know, five degrees isn't very much. And I'll estimate it here, you know, maybe 5 degrees, 10 degrees, 15 degrees. You can kind of imagine, if you think about it like we've even taken the E6B and laid it out and actually draw the line 5 degrees, 10 degrees, 15 degrees, to give you an idea of what that'll look like, you know, from a certain distance out for that angle to come in. So that's a great question. And again, it's. It's kind of simple, but it's hard, right? If. If you haven't figured it out yet, I understand why you can have be having trouble. And I had a guy call me the night before his checkride. He's in Ohio, I'm in California. And he's like, kenny, I might check rides tomorrow. And I can't figure out. I still don't understand the approaches. I'm like, oh, my God. I'll do what I can over the phone to help you. But if you're. The night before your check, ride is not the time. Figuring out what that approach should look like. This is PD Private Pilot 101 helicopter trading blueprint. The link is down below to get a free PDF, so you sign up with your email and you'll immediately be able to download the free PDF. You'll also have an opportunity to purchase the paperback if you would like. So that link is down below along with a link for ask hogs.com if you're new to us. We have a clone 14 years. My digital content's piped into it. You can ask it questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Here's a tip on the clone though. It's got a lot of content in it, but we've had some people asking specific questions like with a, you know, can I fly into this specific airport? Can I do this right? Like we haven't fed the clone actual supplement charts. So asking it things like how many miles from this airport to that airport is not going to have that information. We haven't loaded it with that kind of information. We've loaded it with all my videos, podcasts, you know, blogs, paid content, free content. It's all in there. But you know, we don't teach, you know, that that whole sectional chart part of aviation isn't loaded into the clone. So it has its limits on what you can ask. But you can ask anything helicopter, flight and ground related, related directly to learning. So there's 19 of you previous, sorry, 18. We have our 19th coming in just about a week that we're going to finish up. So we have a few spots left for the spring of 2025. So you got to get in now if you want one of these. Because of course as we're moving into spring, people are talking, they're calling. So we've got like three spots left for the spring if you want to get in. We're going to put a link down below this video. We've got a short questionnaire to see if you qualify for the final approach course. Go through that at the link below, answer the question and we'll get back to you if you look like you're a good fit or we're a good fit to get you finished up. We got three spots basically for the spring so we can make you number 20, number 21 and number 22 on the Hogs Wall of Fame. And these are limited because I'm just saying I'm not sure exactly how long I'm going to continue this. I got some other things I got cooking, so I don't know if you wanted, if you want to get finished, you need to go below, fill out that form, answer the questions and we'll get back to you right away and we'll look and see if we can get you set up to get your rating finished. So you have two choices, R22 or R44. And the way this works, we do a minimum of three days. So we're going to work together doing the flying and ground for three days. Day number four, take a checkride. So three hours of flight prep, one hour for the checkride. Again this is minimum. And we'll have you finished and send you home. So you have two choices as we said, R22 and R44. So the minimum for the R44 is 6800 for the minimum package to get get you finished again. If you need more time, we can always work something out. Or if you want a VIP package, then on the minimum for the R22 it's 5300. Again that is the minimum. But if we didn't tell you, we've been working with this Same examiner for 24 years. We've completed 19 of these. You could be 20, 21 or 22. Get finished up for the spring, get on the schedule now. So go down below, fill out that questionnaire and we'll get back to you, see if we can get you finished up. That's all I got. Peace out. When you feel the pressure to fly, but know the right decision is to stay on the ground, hit the hogs. No go and live to fly another day. Helicopterground.com.