How to Use the Examiner as a Resource During Your Check-Ride

Kenny Keller explains how to ask the examiner for help during a check-ride and when they'll refuse. In a hover, if you need to adjust carb heat, keep your hand on the collective and use ground set/roll-down/below-governor technique instead, which takes 20 to 60 seconds safely. Recent local accidents show this mistake keeps failing pilots.
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So a little example of something to think about for any of your checkrides. The examiner is a resource. Don't be afraid to use him as a resource. Him or her, however, just be prepared on what they may or may not say if you ask them for help. And I'll give you an example. Right now we're in a hover. We just came down out of an approach. I've got full carb heat on. So on a checkride, you'd have one of two choices. You could ask the examiner, hey, examiner, would you mind pushing that carpet down for me? And the examiner's response could be, no, you do it. Okay, so now I know I got to do it. Examiners are not willing to do it. So in a hover with an examiner on board, I am not going to reach down and shut that off. You don't take your hand off the collective during a hover. Our examiners, very good. Possibly they would fail you for that. So what you want to do? Set it down the ground, and let's see how long this takes. It's 23 minutes, 58 seconds. I'm gonna go down, gonna roll, and I'm actually even gonna roll down just a little bit because I'm conservative and paranoid. And I roll down below the governor, lock the collective, push it down, unlock, and pick back up. So we're about 20 seconds since I started that now. I can still take my time, 30 seconds maybe or so, pick it back up, and there's a minute, a minute out of your time to safely push that down. Some people say, well, that's too much time. Well, you don't want to take your hand off of that collective during a hover. And we keep talking about this. We know two different flight schools in our vicinity that have lost helicopters in the last year from students out soloing, taking their hand off the collective. And something bad happened in the helicopter rolling over and being destroyed. So it does happen. And there's even another one. I remember we just recently read about where an instructor was student. His instructor's door popped loose. Instructor took his hand off the collective to reach over and close the door. Collective drop. They hit something, rolled the helicopter over, and destroyed it. So there's three in the last year that I could think of rough the top of my head. So during a hover, don't take your hair up the collective, ask the examiner to help you. And our examiner, nine times out of a 10, our examiner go, oh, sure, I'll get that for you. But maybe one out of ten times he'll go, now you do it. And the examiner just wants to check and see. He just wants to know, well, what are you going to do when you're in here by yourself, you know, if I don't help you, what would you do? So a short tip, something to think about. So in that respect, ask an examiner to help you. Be prepared for that examiner to say sure and help you, or maybe not. And it could be anything you need to take the control, scratch your nose, whatever the case is, don't be afraid to ask them to help you, but be prepared if they refuse your request and it's not them being, you know, they just want to see what you're going to do. That's it. All right, well, leave us some comments down below. What else you'd like to see. We've got a few more videos to go. We're covering topics like that one right there. It's a good topic because this has come up in our last 30 checkrides. In the last 30 months. It has come up with people coming here for advanced ratings that sometimes they take their hand off the collective during hovering. I'm like, don't, don't do that. And especially don't do that with an examiner, because that can get you failed on the check. Right? So do us a favor, subscribe the channel, click the little bell below, maybe notified of the other videos we got coming out, and we'll see you next video.
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