Inadvertent IMC Fatal Accident Review From Live Training Tuesday

Sam. Oh, am I live? You're live. Hey kenny with helicopterground.com do us a favor. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven't done that yet. Today we're going to talk about inadvertent imc. We're going to roll this video and I'm going to put up a disclaimer and I'll put up again in a couple minutes. You know, today is just, we're going to cover some stuff. Food for thought. We're going to show you an accident that happened where these people lost their lives. And it's a horrible event. But we want to share the video so that it can give you an idea of kind of happens and we'll watch it and we'll talk about it a little bit and then We've got a PowerPoint. We're going to go through some things. Our operations manager, Brian Rutledge shared his training PowerPoint that he used with his flight officers that he puts them through every six months. It's got some good stuff in it and it's a pretty long presentation. So we're going to keep this at an hour today. We want to keep it laid back because this is about just making you aware of what can happen and let you know what you can do to keep yourself out of this and hopefully never get into it. But in the event you did what you can do to get out of it. So first let me say hi to everybody that's here. We have Sam. He logged in early before we were ready. Anyone there? Yep, we're here now. Bonnie Seymour. Hi Kenny and Gary. Dean Seymour from Minnesota. Dean's the one that travels all the way, drives 10 hours out here to see us and do ground school and occasionally fly in the instrument. So Sam's from Sellersburg, Indiana. Awesome. Right here in Indiana. That's cool. Jason Kraus, Central Florida. Jason, let's get the party started. Alright, we are. Juanita. Here she is again. Jenny. I met her at Heli Expo last year. Was an awesome one of our first members. Bought first day March 1, 2012 she's still here. She's in SoCal. Look forward to seeing her next time. I'm back out to California. Stan Riverton, Utah Awesome. Brian Bay, Las Vegas, Nevada Jason hasn't started yet. I can't see anything. I don't know how old that comment is. Nobody else is saying anything about whether they can see us or not. So let us know in the YouTube chat if you can see us and hear us. Okay. Nobody else has mentioned anything yet. Jason, thanks. Sam, John, Tampa. John Fuller, Tampa. Checking in. Greg Crumpson, Cincinnati, Ohio, Xavier Gomez. What's up? Pensacola here. Nice. Rick again from Vegas. Down there flying with Taz Jason. That's what I'm talking about. Florida representing Christopher Houser. Hello. Anyone? Christopher Hauser, he was here with us last week. His schedule didn't allow you to be here with this week but you've been seeing Chris in our videos so that's awesome that he's logging in. John Fuller. Video is good. Richard Foost, Orlando, Florida. Awesome. Sam, going strong. Good video and audio, awesome. Jessica Amaris. Looking good here. Awesome. Cool. That catches us up. So today it's just me and Gary. This is just the two of us. So bear with us as we catch up who is here with us. And as you bring your questions in and your comments, let's try to kind of keep it on point today. This is to do with, you know, inadvertent IMC instrument training, so on, so forth. So first I'm going to pull up PowerPoint here and have Gary share my screen for me unless I can figure it out how to do it. Alright, so as I mentioned, please subscribe to our YouTube channel that helps us a ton. So real quick, before we get started, we made some new links to help people navigate quicker to where you want to go. If you're interested in the instrument training, you can go to joininstrumentpilot.com for just a quick, easy to remember link. If you want to get in on that, we have a special discount code we're going to give out in a bit of to join helicopter online ground school. If you're not a member yet, join hogs.com very simple, very easy. Join hogs.com joinremotepilot.com we've separated the remote pilot from helicopter ground school along with how to build your online business, which I'll mention in a minute. So if you're just into helicopters, you just go to the helicopter site. We're not going to annoy you with remote pilot stuff. If you're interested in remote pilot training, you can go to joinremotepilot.com and then if you're interested in how to build an online business, go to join BYOB.com that's where I talk about how I do everything that I do. So disclaimer. It's up to you to know the procedures for your aircraft in your environment. Okay, so what we talk about today, we're going to talk about some different things. Wherever you're flying in the world, procedures at your flight school or the company that you work for or the country that you're flying in, maybe you will be guided to do something different than what we talk about today. We just want to bring the awareness up of what to do to stay safe. So I made two points today. We just want to make you aware of what can happen if you're not prepared. Okay? That's the biggest thing, is to go inadvertent imc and if you're not prepared, the outcome is probably going to be ugly. Alright? So it really is about being prepared. So we also want to talk about, you know, training is available to help you in the event it ever happens to you. So those are the two big things that I wanted to cover. So real quick, before we get to the video, let's just cover real quick. What is imc? Inadvertent entry in instrument meteorological conditions where deteriorating weather prevents you from flying under visual meteorological conditions when you were planning to fly vfr. Again, back to not being prepared. A loss of horizon references and or accompanying a loss of visual contact with the ground. So this is from Brian, he has in red. Double IMC encounters are some of the most demanding, disorienting and dangerous conditions a pilot can't experience. So if you want to go back to my camera, Gary, I will tell you after we watch this video, I'll tell you a couple of quick stories. And my stories get too long sometimes, so I'll try to keep them short. But I have a couple of instances. I'm gonna admit there's three I'm thinking of in my 20 years of flying where I screwed up big time. And we'll get to those. And I want to admit the mistakes that I made to help me maybe help prevent you from having a problem like this. So if you want to slide that video over, Gary, a lot of you have probably seen this. Maybe you have, maybe you haven't. We grabbed it from somebody else's page on the Internet and this is a wedding flight and before we even go with it, well, let's just go ahead and make it up big and we'll let it roll. Gary, let's turn the volume up a little bit and they can hopefully pick up the audio off my mic. Okay, now this is a shorter version. I've seen a version where they take off and it's sunny. Beautiful. Oh great. Bestgore.com I don't promote anything called bestgore.com. At this point. You can tell that they're worried, they're concerned or wondering what's going on. Okay, he's. This is going bad already. I meant to play the video where it started out with the sun shining, but here he is an imc. He had opportunities prior to this where he could have land. When he first started getting into it, you could see green on the ground. She's still smiling at this point, but you can tell he's getting pretty nervous. He knows something's up. You can see he's cringing in there. Changes in the engine sounding rotor system, sounds changing. So they are in the suit. There's nothing. There's. There's no ground. He's flying ifr. It's about. This is where things are getting really good, getting to go bad. Again. Ignore that going up the screen there. I know it made me sick the first time I saw that video. It made me want to throw up. And again, we were gonna. I ran out of time where I had the full version. If you see the longer version, when they take off, it's sunshine. I mean, the sky looks good, the sun's blaring away, everybody's happy, and they take off. And as they get. He starts getting into the bad weather for a while. You can see the clouds, you know, above. Then you can see him in front of him. He starts kind of skimming through it, but you can see out the windows that they're still green on the ground. So there was opportunities as he started getting into the soup where he could have put it on the ground. Now, I don't know other than I know it's a wedding flight. I'm assuming the pilot wanted to get there, because who doesn't? Especially when you're taking a bride and a groom to their wedding. You want to get them there. And no more than I know just watching it, you know, it is a sick feeling in my stomach because I've been there many times. Where you always want to get to your destination, whether you're flying for fun or you're flying EMS or you're flying news reporting. Whatever it is you're doing, you want to get there. And I'd say nine times out of ten that you run into trouble. It is when you're almost your destination. You know, whether it's 10 miles or 20 miles, it looks good the majority of your trip. And then you start getting closer. Then you start getting closer and the weather starts deteriorating. You think, well, I'm only five miles. It's not too bad yet. I'll go a little farther. And then it comes down a little more. Then you go a Little bit farther and then pretty soon you're in the soup. The first time it happened to me was, and there's a little bit of learning lesson here. I was flying helicopters, but I did my fixed wing add on and I would go from Ohio back to Indiana to get home on my days off. And the guy that owned the flight school had some airplanes and he was nice enough to let me fly in a helicopter or airplane home on the weekends. So here I am, not a very high experienced airplane pilot. I have get home. Itis, I want to get home for the weekend. I've been in Ohio all week. I want to get home. I'm checking the weather and let me tell you this, I called flight service and they said vfr, not recommended. And I thought, well, you know, he doesn't know, he's just giving me what he sees. And. And I had somebody else go, yeah, you probably better just give it up for today. And what do I do? I kept hanging around, hanging around, waiting for it to improve. So I took off and I got halfway between Indiana and Ohio where I was supposed to be to get home. And I'm in an old airplane, an old Tomahawk, no gps, might have had an attitude indicator, was not an instrument ship. And I was at night, started skimming through the bottom of the clouds, got disoriented. And it's been a long time ago and it's pretty horrific, but I found my way out of it. I was so disoriented that when I landed at an airport and when I rolled up to the ramp, I thought I knew where I was. I thought I was in Toledo and I was like over by Sandusky. I was 40, 50 miles away from where I even thought I was. I was that mixed up and confused. I was lucky I didn't lose my life. So that was earlier in my career. Then later as an EMS pilot, I go to two weeks of training for the company I was going to work for. And the whole time they're preaching to you about EMS pilots getting going inadvertent IMC and getting into accidents. And you go through all the training and you hear all the horror stories. Brand new EMS guy. I'm within the first, probably, I don't know, a few months of my job, maybe the first six months, and I get another night flight. We go to a city about half an hour away from where I was based and a thunderstorm comes through. So storm comes through, we go to fire up the aircraft and my number two engine wouldn't start. So they Take the patient by ground. The weather's kind of iffy anyway, so I called the mechanic. I'm there for a couple hours, mechanic comes out, takes care of the problem. And this is late at night, I don't know, midnight, one over two o' clock in the morning and I'm checking weather and the reports are there saying three miles and a thousand feet, feet, and that's in general to get from where I was to get back home. But northern Indiana, there's not a lot of weather reporting sites and there's not a lot of ground reference lighting. When you get out in the middle of nowhere between these cities and the mechanics even like, well, hey, you want to just leave the aircraft here and ride back with me and we'll get the aircraft when the weather cleans up. And I'm like, ah, hey, it's three, you know, they're calling for three and a thousand, you know, it'll be okay. So I take off and halfway home, you know, it's not a thousand. I don't know whether it was 500 or 400 or whatever it was. And I should have just got on the ground, but I kept, you know, okay, I'm halfway there. I'm in the middle of nowhere. I'm going to be embarrassed as the new pilot. Six million dollar aircraft. I'm scared to land in the field and call and you know, here I am. Where am I going to get fired for doing something stupid? You know, if I keep going, am I going to fly into a tower? So it's pretty harrowing experience and in my mind I'm going, okay, here I am, I'm the new EMS pilot. I've just been trained. The weather was, it was less than forecasted. I start scooting through the bottom of the clouds. I was an instrument pilot, so I can, you know, keep the ship level. But I'm a vfr, we're a VFR company, so I could have went ifr, but I'd had to claim an emergency. So do I want to claim an emergency as a brand new EMS pilot, you know, new company, do I have the guts to go on the instruments, start to climb and declare an emergency? You know, that's what I probably should have done. So I get out of it, I get the rest of the way and I set on the ground and I said, I'm never ever going to make that stupid mistake again. And that would have been about 2000 and probably around 2009 or 2010. So since then, no other big ones other than a Lot of times you can be on the ground and the weather report will look kind of decent. And you look at the sky from the ground and you think, oh, it looks like it's pretty, pretty decent. But it's amazing how many times when you just get up to 500ft when you were looking at the ground and you were looking at weather reports, and then you get up and you go, oh, wow, they're reporting four. And this ain't four. This is like two. So you can't always trust what the. The weather's telling you. When you're checking an atis, you know you're looking at something on a computer screen. How accurate is it, and how much is the weather going to change between point A and point B? So I'll take a little break here. You got anything you want to add, Gary, While I check YouTube comments or anything you want to add or say?

Were you going to talk about Brian's recommendation for handling IMC? The procedures?

Yeah, it's in the PowerPoint. We'll kind of COVID those as we go through it.

I did find the what not to do short little video of the panicked VFR pilot. Okay, when you want to decide to roll that?

Okay, maybe we'll roll that after. Let's check up on comments here.

Okay.

And thanks, everybody that's here. Subscribe to our channel. If you haven't done that yet, I wanted a no video, no audio. Let me back up even further. Jason got it on my iPhone. Christopher Hauser finally got it. Indiana here. Hellevate Helicopter services. How's it from SA fishing host Nell McGee. Looks like watching. All the way from Ireland. Keep up the good work. Awesome. All the way from Ireland, Jessica Maris. Greeting from Colorado. I think I mentioned her already. Yep. And let's go back down this way. Adam. Adam here. Normally tune in from Middle Georgia State University, but home in Charleston, South Carolina this week. Awesome. Harley here. Harley's here every week. Robinson again. Report says they were on approach when it hit trees. Referring to the video, I'm not surprised. They were probably before even without even knowing or reading it. I just assumed they were probably almost there. I was going to post the report on Facebook page and then ran across the news of the Bell 407 Sunday that went down in Arkansas. I haven't read anything on that. It gives me goosebumps every time I see another EMS helicopter crashed. You know, it's upsetting every time I hear it because I lived that life for five years. I know why it's happened. I'm hoping it's better now. I was an EMS pilot in 2008, I think, when it was the worst in history. And we will kind of talk through that. But it's a problem. I mean, and it's usually the pilot doing something stupid. I mean, quite honestly. And a lot of times it's not even when you know the medical career is not even on board, it's the pilot's going to get fuel or the pilot leaves the medical crew for some reason is going back to the airport or whatever. A lot of times guys crash on their own. So I heard about this last EMS crash, but every time, I just, I usually figure nine times out of ten they flew into bad weather. It's not every time. Let's see, I don't know if you guys saw we're get homitis, get homeitis is the problem. It's always get homitis. And again, whether it's get home, itis like in the example I was giving you in the airplane or it's you got a patient on board and you got three more miles to go and the weather's going to hell in a hand basket and your medical career is in the back going, are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? The last thing you want to do is turn and go to some other airport when you have them almost there. So it's easy for me to stand up here. It's easy for anybody to say, oh, that guy did wrong and you shouldn't do this and you should have known better. Saying no is the first way to keep yourself out of all this. Let's see. Jason. Don't make sense to me. Yeah. Somebody else asked, what doesn't sense make make sense? Sure. What does it make sense? Alan Palmer. Hi. From South Africa. Nice. Pushing past your limits. Why? Asking for bad stuff to happen. It happens and it happens to pilots all the time. That's why these EMS crashes keep happening. These pilots all have minimum, probably five years experience, 2,000 hours or more. You never go out intending to push past your limits. You go out intending to do the right thing and be a safe and prudent pilot. And then circumstances. Sometimes, as I said before, it's. There's times when we know we should land, there's times when we know we should turn around and that get homitis is over you. You know, and especially on an EMS flight you're trained to not. They tell you right from the beginning, they say, don't tell this to your medical crew because they won't like it. But we're paying you to say no. We are paying you to haul cargo from point A to point B. If you go on an EMS flight with the mindset that you've got an injured patient or somebody dying in the back, you're going to take chances and you're going to do things that you probably shouldn't do. You got to keep the human side out of it, okay? You're trained that way, you know that. But then they also showed us a video when I was at my that company and they go, we want to show you a real world accident, guys. This is a reenactment, but this was from our company. And this EMS helicopter pilot goes and lands at a scene and he's getting ready to do his pre start as they're loading a patient and he realizes there's something out of whack on the instrument panel. And I can't remember exactly which piece of something that wasn't working. And the reenactment shows this guy like before he left the house that morning, he's kissing his kids goodbye like little blond haired, little girl. You know, I have a similar story on that one. And you see him like you could tell by the way they filmed this that he knows he should just cancel the flight because of this problem he's having. But you see him looking in the back and it's a little blond haired girl in the back. So by the way they film it, you know what the guy's thinking, well, this problem isn't so bad that I can't fly and get us there safely. And the last thing you see is him starting up and then flying away. Well, it ended up being an accident and I can't remember how many were killed or whether they were all killed. And so they were driving at home that, you know, here's a pilot who let the human factor come over and you can't help it. Same way I can remember going to an accident scene. And you get there and you're trained, stay with the aircraft. You know, you don't go to the accident, you don't carry bags, you don't assist with the patient. That's their job. There's firemen there, there's policemen, they can handle that. Get your aircraft ready to go. So I felt like I was pretty good at keeping my head about me and not letting the human side get in, involved in my decision making. But I can tell you there was one night where they loaded this patient and this patient is screaming from pain. And I mean even over the sound of the aircraft with the headsets on, it was like almost made my blood boil. So I had to go, okay, you know, I wasn't going to cancel the flight because he's screaming. But it's got me, it's got me shaken up in the front going, oh my God. You know, normally they have a more stable before the, they ever load them into the helicopter. It's not normal that you have somebody loaded that's just screaming and going crazy. And I'm sure within a few minutes they got this patient sedated and got them calmed down. But that initial moment of getting ready to take off and go fly when this person in the back is screaming and this person's injured, probably a brain injury, they can't help it. It's not their fault that they're screaming, but it's completely rattling me as the pilot. So I'm going, okay, you know, take a big deep breath, breathe, think through what you're doing. And I don't even remember what the weather was and when we got home safely and I don't think we had a weather issue that day. But I'm giving you the real, real world example, another one and then I'll move on. Another EMS flight, same deal. I normally don't pay attention. What's going on the back, we're on the rooftop. I have the helicopter all ready to go. They come walking out of the hospital and they come up the ramp with this patient and they go right past me and it's a little blond haired girl about probably six or seven years old. Well, at that time I had a little blond girl at home, six or seven years old. And as they go past me, you know, I don't normally look. I looked and the nurse says to me something to the effect of, you know, this is why you kiss your kid on the head at night before you leave for work, you know, so they load this patient in there and then I'm already, you know, hooked and I look inside and I'm going, stop. I know better. I know not to be looking at the patient, but it's on my mind, okay? Even with the training I had and even with knowing better, I get in the aircraft, I get started up, we normally just go back to our home base. But this child was in bad shape. So we were going to go to Indianapolis to probably to Riley, where, you know, we're the best help you can get for a child. Well, we normally have enough fuel to get to Indy, no problem. This night we had high winds coming out of the south So I take up on this flight and I'm flying along and I'm going, you know, immediately. The whole time I'm flying, I'm checking fuel, and I know how many minutes, how many minutes per hour I'm burning. I know my ground speed, and I'm computing this stuff. So I'm flying along and I'm thinking in my mind, man, I can make it to the hospital. But at this rate, with this wind, by the time I land at the hospital, shut down, unload, and we fly to the nearby airport or the nearby heliport to get fuel, I'm going to be in reserve, okay? So, you know in your mind, what are you going to do? Are you going to fly to go get your reserve illegally because you have a small child in the back? So I'm computing in my mind, okay? In five years, I never stop for fuel with a patient on board. Ever. Wasn't. Not most generally. Not most generally. Done. So I'm flying down there, I'm computing in my head, and I'm going, I think I'm going to need to get fuel in order to do this legally. And about that time, the nurse says, hey, Kenny, I know I'm not supposed to say this, but could you hurry up? This child's circling the drain. Okay? She's trained as a nurse. You never ask the pilot to speed up. You never ask the pilot to hurry. We were trained. We fly at 120 knots. And they're like, you fly to 120 knots, guys, that's it. So. And she's a good friend of mine. And she's a good friend of mine to this day, but she knew better not to ask me that. Still in my mind, I'm going, oh, great. You know, I'm already trying to decide, am I going to hop over to get fuel down in my reserves and do that illegally? What if, you know, what if I go to land at the airport or the hospital and there's another helicopter there, some other problem that makes me fly a couple extra minutes so I know where I can stop at the local air Force reserve base. I know they have a call out 24 hours. So I have our dispatch call ahead and said, can you have somebody available in like, 15 minutes to do a refuel? I didn't even ask for hot refuel because we didn't do hot refuels with this company, even in ems. So I made the choice. I said, sorry, guys, we got to stop for fuel. Of course, they didn't see anything, or if they did, I Just I ignored it. But here I am being pressured and I'm putting all pressure on myself. Little child in the back, they're going, hey, can you hurry up? We know we can't say that, but this child's in bad shape. So it only did. It took us about 12 minutes. I landed, we stopped, we got fuel. I got just enough to get us there, have our reserve and get to where we were going. But right there is an example how a pilot puts himself into trouble. I did everything right. We had the normal amount of fuel. Only thing is, I didn't account for the wind that night. But I would have had to take in more fuel on before I left. And we're always on the verge of being too heavy because people think, oh, you're twin engine turbine, you can always just take all the fuel you want. No, you can't. You can only take a certain amount of fuel with you on any given flight. So that night there's an example of what happens to a person in the real world and why sometimes they push it. Why sometimes your gut knows the right thing to do, but then your heart wants to do something else, you know. So anyway, off on a tangent there, but that's. I want to give you the real world because this is how pilots get into trouble. So I'm going to go back here and check, check some comments. All right, already seen that one. Taz, finally here from Vegas. Awesome. There you go. More than likely when pilots have promised a tour group or charter something, don't want to let them down so they push themselves. Absolutely. We know the right thing to do, we know what it is. But sometimes people just push themselves past when there's no doubt. There's no doubt. I agree. Alan. Agreed. Alan. Maturity plus experience. There's Jody from South Louisiana, Ted Wells, Central Indian. Okay, Like Kenny always says, make good choices. And that's why we're talking about it. You know, I haven't crashed from inadvertent imc. I had a couple close calls and now this is one thing I'm honest about. I like the fact that I fly now in a controlled environment. You know, I fly when we have helicopters here and I fly when I want to fly. I don't have to fly anymore. I'm not, I don't have some, somebody else writing my paycheck where I feel like, oh my gosh, you know, oh, I gotta fly. And another fast real world example, before I was ever in ems, I flew news. Well, guess what? Good sized city, three news stations, weather, zippy. Guess what happens? You get out, you go on a call, one station goes up, next station goes up, your station calls in one you to go up, whether it be below my comfortable minimums. And I'd say, well, no, I'm not going to go. And they go, well, Fox is up. Well, Channel 9's up. I'm like, well, that's the choice of those pilots. I'm not going to go. Ten minutes later the phone rings. It's my boss. Hey buddy, News station just called, said you wouldn't take that flight. And I'm like, yeah, I can't see the top of the buildings downtown. That's how low the clouds are here. Well, it's beautiful down here where I'm at. And I'm like, well, I don't care what it's doing where you're at. I'm downtown right now and I can't see the tops of the buildings downtown. I'm not going. Oh, you know, so those are kind of things that are put on you especially when you're in a group environment. News reporting, there's other two other stations up getting their shots because these pilots are going up in weather that was less than vfr. And then news station's pushing me because the new station wants the flight once. When I say no, they call my boss. Then my boss calls me, hey, buddy, how come you didn't go? That's real world pressure that pops up, alright? I have no problem saying no. I care about my life. Me too. And again, that's why I don't even have to worry about it anymore. The weather's crappy, I'm not going. And I was just telling Gary a story about one of the last times I did something was three years ago going to get a jet Ranger from New Hampshire. And that was the last time I did something that we didn't do anything dangerous. But the owner of the aircraft wanted to get home and for like two days I'm going, man, the weather's horrible, I'm not going. And he haunted me so much that finally I go, okay, you know what? You really want to go? Be prepared to get your butt kicked going through the mountains because it's going to beat us up and it's going to be cold and we're probably going to end up stuck in some little town somewhere because we're going to run into some crap. We did. It took us two days to get home when it should have taken us four hours. He was freezing, I was freezing because the heater didn't work right in the helicopter. It was a horrible trip home. That's the last time I did anything that I didn't really want to do three years ago. And I won't do it again. I told Gary, I said, and I should have just stood up to the owner and said, look, get on a plane and go home and when the weather's fine, I'll come home, you know, And I let that guy push me. Didn't do anything dangerous, but it was uncomfortable and it was super cold out and the heater just wasn't very good. So learn from my idiot mistakes. Alright, what else we got? One of the mean reasons someone pushes it because most pilots think they are the best pilot. You get in a situation and you think you can handle it until you're in over your head. Absolutely. There's Jenny. All good. Now Taz, that's why I teach to set your limits and then don't exceed them for any reason. And that's right Taz. And, and we'll get to that. The PowerPoint if we don't run out of time, we may turn this into maybe this will be part one. When I was talking to Brian yesterday, he goes, oh my God, you guys got a ton of content for tomorrow and just his presentation. There's no way I can get through everything that he provided to us. There's no way I can get through it all. But that's one point that Taz just made that's in the PowerPoint and I'll go ahead and expand on it now. You know, he pushes in. The PowerPoint is make your decisions, you know, and he's teaching to law enforcement officers that are pilots that may or may not be instrument rated and they're flying for their department. And he said, you know, whether it's his guys at the department or it would be in new training, it's teaching students or teaching new pilots, not just students but like say a new private pilot or any pilot for example, you got to set your minimums and Brian talks about some minimums in the PowerPoint but that is the point and I agree. Task when you're new or old, either way you got to set your own minimum. And when you go below what you think is right, that is where you run into trouble. Give an example. Flying EMS, we had a 800ft and 2 miles was where we could legally go. That's our bare minimum. Below that we couldn't fly. And they told us, they said guys, just because it's 802 that doesn't mean you can go that's your minimum. If you're out and it's getting close to that minimum, you should be turning around and going home. So I made my EMS minimums, standard vfr. I made it three miles and I made it a thousand feet. The other pilots, you know, military guys, been flying forever, 802, I'm going. And away they go. That's great, that's, that's their choice. But then I'm questioned, well, it was three miles and a thousand feet. It was basic vfr. Why didn't you go? And I said, because you know what, I want at least basic VFR or I'm not going. And I stuck to that. Even as an EMS pilot, I stuck to three miles and 1,000ft. I was recently training a guy from, he's out in West Virginia and he's working towards his private. And I asked him this question online. We were doing some one on one stuff and I said, what's your personal minimums? And he's like, oh, I don't know, 802. And I'm like, 802, are you serious? And he's like, yeah. I go, you're a student pilot getting ready to be a private pilot and your minimums are 802. And he goes, yeah, I've been around helicopters a long time, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And I'm going, student pilot, getting ready to be a new private pilot. 802 is not enough. 2 miles is when you go up and you got 2 miles of visibility. 2 miles ain't crap. I mean, and if it's reporting to, it might be a mile. So you know, as a new pilot, your minimums probably ought to be more like above marginal, you know, marginal VFR is what, three to five, was it? 3,000 to 5,000 and three to five miles, is that right? I shouldn't be spelling that before I know it. But you know, as a new pilot you should probably be. You probably shouldn't even fly in marginal. You should probably be above that. Alright, off on my tangents here. Let me go back and see what else we got. All right, so that was good from Taz. Yep, elaborate on that. That's why I teach, don't exceed them for any reason. Yep. Taz, have you seen that movie with Tom Cruise? And come here. Alright, whatever. That's kind of off topic. All right, what else we got? Don't do anything else real relevant there. I think we made a comment for everybody that's been in here. Oh wait, here we go. Make your minimums on the ground on a sunny day. The the time to update your personal minimums is not while airborne in the soup. Absolutely, Taz. Perfect, perfect advice. Here we go from John. Marginal vfr. A thousand three thousand and three to five miles. There you go. So as a new pilot, you might want to be above 3 and above 5. Taz. Again, as the saying goes, there are old pilots and there are bold pilots. There are no old bold pilots. Absolutely no reason to push the weather. Exactly. Exactly. Alright, I'll get ready. Back to PowerPoint. I think I've got everybody caught up there. Anything you want to Jacob. I like Taz. Taz is awesome. Jacob. Taz performs in our instrument pilot training videos. So if you're not a part of our instrument training program as of yet, you might want to take advantage of that. We do have additional discount. Let's go ahead and mention that before I go back to the PowerPoint. Gary created this yesterday. So you can thank chief pilot Gary Cleveland for this one. And Gary created a code that is, if I remember correctly, IMC 20 off. IMC 20 off for Instrument Meteorological conditions. Now we've had a discount before on these yearly and the unlimited. But on this one you can use it for the first month off the monthly as well. So 20% off the instrument ground school. And you can use joininstrumentpilot.com underneath this video. No matter which way you're watching, whether you're watching on YouTube, you're watching inside ground school, or you're watching on the actual link from the email that we put out. That link is below the video. Either that one or it might say instrumentpilot.com or whatever. But there's a link below. You can take advantage of our instrument training and we highly suggest you do that because I can tell you this, when I looked at this morning, I went to, I hadn't told Gary this, but I looked at him like that's all we're charging for those. And I was gonna go down say, Gary, I think it's time we upped those instrument charges a little bit. And I didn't get down there to tell him because we were all getting ready to go. But the prices on the instrument training are going to go up. So you should jump in right now while we have discount on monthly, yearly or and or unlimited. Alright, so we went through all those links. If you want to go back to sharing my computer with everybody, we'll say the disclaimer one more time. It's up to you to know the procedures for your aircraft in your environment. Okay? So in case you don't agree with something, we stay here today. This is general rules. These are talking about things that you need to be thinking about. But what you might need to do as far as the procedures for the aircraft or the flight school or the company you're flying with could vary from what we tell you here today. We want to keep you aware of what can happen if you're not prepared and training that is available to help you in the event it has ever happened. So even if you're a private pilot, you should go get 5 or 10 hours of instrument training, join our instrument ground school, work towards your rating. So I believe we covered that. What is imc? So we're gonna go through this. What time is it, Gary? So I know when I can start trying to.

I got about 20 minutes left.

Is it like 11:40? 140. Wow. Holy cow. Well, let's go through this, some of this and we'll start trying to wrap it up a little bit. And I just went, change the size of my screen while I do that. There we go. We go. We'll go through some of this stuff. IFR flight allows for pre planning and setup of avionics and radios. Planned IFR flight is conducted in IFR certified aircraft. Planned flight instrument into instrument conditions does not carry surprise or shock that IMC flight does. Planned IFR flight is. Whoops. Getting, getting happy on my buttons here. Planned IFR flight conducted is an IFR AT system ATC system. And during planned IFR flight, entry into IMC is usually done with the wings level on the climb. Okay. So if you're an instrument rated pilot, that's how it happens. You're prepared, you're ready to go. So some ways to avoid IMC and this is good for everybody. Whoops. Man, I'm crazy on these buttons. Get my hand off the button. Obtain a good weather briefing forecast for your flight. Okay, this is probably the biggest. This is what we were talking about yesterday when we decided to do this today. We thought, you know what, this is perfect timing. Or actually I brought it up and Brian says, yeah, you guys should do that. You know, in Indiana. This is time for us, for the weather to go. Go to crap. It's been nice all summer, it's been nice all fall. But just in the last week we started getting those rainy overcast days, low visibility. And that's kind of what Gary and I were talking about with Brian yesterday. The biggest thing is doing a good weather briefing. We knowing what the weather you have before you ever leave. You know, you should be looking at the night before. And if you have our pre flight magnet refrigerator magnet checklist, it's right on there. You should be checking the weather before you ever leave the house. So avoid flight and marginal vfr, which we just mentioned a little bit ago. That's always a good idea, especially for a newer pilot. Check weather ahead of your route and use atc used planned enroute decision point points when to turn around. And this is one that Brian brought up yesterday and I agree with it. You know, you should be making good decisions to start with. But let's say you think that the weather is going to be pretty decent and you're going to be able to make it safely. You should be planning on what if. What if we have weather that's lower than forecasted? Because that happens. I can tell you that happens a lot in 20 years. The more I learn about weather, the more I don't know about weather. I can tell you a forecast is a forecast is a forecast. That's all it is. It's telling you what the weather might be doing here in Indiana. The actual weather could be so far from the forecasted weather can be so far from what the real weather is that it's not even funny. And I can also tell you again, I mentioned earlier weather reporting sites because it says it's three miles and 5,000. Don't be surprised when you get close to that, that area and it's not anywhere near three miles and 5,000. And I can't tell you why that would happen. But very common, very, very common that the weather forecast is lower than what they discussed. So let's get through a little more of this stuff that Brian said he thought we should point out today. Again, happy trigger finger, let's go back. Recognize signs, deteriorating weather, obscured hills, fog, visual precipitation, and the need to descend below your planned altitude. Assess the situation and if signs back up, the warnings decide to land or turn around before you go imc. So yes, if you're a VFR pilot, avoiding this at all cost and never ever getting into it is what we hope for you. We don't ever want you to get into it, period. All right, we're gonna save this for another day because we, we need to update some of the training inside the HOG sites. So we're gonna skip over this because we could spend another half hour on all this spatial disorientation. Whenever there's a conflict between the information relayed by your eyes and the information relied by your Body, especially your vestibular system, spatial disorientation results. So what I want to say there is. And we were discussing with Brian yesterday. We were. I was talking with Brian. He's out in California. We're here and Gary's listening in. So we're kind of having a group conversation. And that's the other thing Brian pointed out that he thought he wanted me to mention today. And it's true. You could get into spatial disorientation. That's not imc. You could get into that without even being IMC on a night where it's close to it. Maybe you're out bebopping around and the weather's kind of low and you don't have good ground lighting. So you could get into. It's not inadvertent IMC if you're not in the clouds, but you can still get into spatial disorientation when the weather's iffy. Because maybe you're flying low, flying along a lakeshore. I know I've had times flying along lakeshore where, you know, I'm kind of cutting across a little bit of the lake and I have visual reference over here. But you look down for your instance for a second, you look up and you go, whoa. You know, you just for a few seconds and you lose that, you lose that horizon. And you can very quickly let the aircraft start getting out of control. So let's go back over here, see what else we got before we quit for the day. I'm thinking we will probably have a number two. Maybe we'll continue on next week and get some more of this. Gary, do you want to run that audio? Do you have it ready to go? Oh, sure. You know, it's a. We could go through psychological conditions. These are all things that you got to think about whether you're flying vfr, ifr, you worry about inadvertent imc. You know, all these things are gonna affect you if. If you're not in good physical shape or you have problems. These are things going on in your life. Are you gonna be able to handle an inadvertent IMC problem? You know, I'm safe checklist. You got all the aeronautical decision making points. Yeah, this is good stuff. This is a nice presentation, but I think we've hit a lot of the real main stuff. We will bring this back up and let's roll that. Brian suggested we listen to this, and I think I listened to it a long time ago. I don't remember. Gary listened to it yesterday after Brian told us to look it up. So this is what, 2 minutes 21. 2 minutes long. I heard, I heard a few seconds of it and I'm like, wow. If we want to get somebody's attention, maybe when we roll that, the beginning tomorrow. But we'll go ahead and roll it now and let's, let's see what this one's all about. VFR pilot enters IFR conditions.

9815, let me say last.

No position.

I have 15 minutes. Calling for Dodge. Release the stick, go forward on the stick and then slowly back again. 9815 Lima, remain VFR if you can remain straight and level. Squad 7700 if you have a transponder. 9815 Lima, do you have a transponder? Sir, I do right now. A Niner eight one five Lima, please transfer.

Nothing going on here.

In my opinion, it's a training video to teach you how panic is not the thing to do.

They've just taken the audio and put it to this. You think?

I believe It's a reenactment.

November 15 Lima, try to remain straight and level right now. November 15 Lima, I understand you are in IFR conditions. Do your best to keep wings straight and level and flying straight and level. We're going to try to get you in contact with air traffic control center. Okay? November Niner 815 Lima, are you able to switch frequencies? 90815 Lamont, contact Chicago Center. 118.15. 118.15. If you do not establish communications, come back to us immediately on this frequency.

Alright, well that gives you an idea what it might sound like if somebody's really, really in the soup. I was discussing this with Brian yesterday. You know, if you've got some instrument training, let's use Gary, for example. Gary doesn't have his instrument rating, but yesterday or not yesterday, when we were doing his commercial, we went out and did five hours of instrument training for the commercial. He had no instrument training prior to that, hasn't had any since then. But at least Gary's had the minimum. Okay. And I'm going to say five hours because five hours is minimum. It doesn't mean he can go fly instruments, but it means he knows how to go to the instruments. And the majority of that five hours we went out and we just, you know, I'd put the foggles on him, have him put the foggles on and I would get him all kind of messed up and then I would play the. I'm the tower and I would have him call for help. And basically what I would do is give him vectors, you know, have him level out. First thing, which he knew to do that, level the aircraft out. And I would give him headings and altitudes to vector him around and get him back to the airport. And of the five hours, that's a lot of what we did. We did some ILS stuff and you know, different approaches and things. But I really focused for those five hours, I focused with Gary on what you would do if you went inadvertent imc, how you could level the aircraft out, call for help, squawk emergency and get ATC to help you get back home again or get you to an airport. If you're a private pilot and you've never had any instrument training and you went out and inadvertently got, went imc, got into the clouds and any day or night it's going to be bad. Not trying to scare you, but I have my highly doubts, I highly doubt that you're going to be able to survive that if you're alone, if you've had never had any kind of at least basic instrument training. So we want to encourage you watching. If you're not an instrument rated pilot or you've never had any instrument training, even if you are not planning on being a commercial pilot, you're not planning on being a CFI, you should spend the money and go get five hours, you know, 10 would be even better. It makes you a better pilot, helps keep you safe, it's going to help you better with your weather decisions and it's going to make you a better pilot. And you know, yesterday we brought up the point that even an instrument pilot who doesn't fly all the time, you know, you have to have a certain, certain amount of approaches and do things to keep your instrument rating current. Heck, I'm not even current because we just don't get that opportunity here. The helicopters we have aren't usually instrument trainers and we're busy enough just going out and doing our standard training that we. Not a lot do we think about, hey, let's go out and fly some instrument approaches. And we can only do them in training, even if we have the basic equipment for doing like an instrument approach. So it can only. Just. What I'm getting at is even if you have instrument training or have an instrument rating and you haven't flown instruments in a long time, that's not guaranteeing your survival either. You know, Gary kept saying, keep calm, keep calm as in with anything in life. You know, here you hear that Guy screaming. He survived, but was getting on the radio and screaming, you know, may, May upside down. I mean, he couldn't help but the poor guy's, you know, worried about losing his life. But making decisions and avoiding in the first place is number one. And we just want to. If you don't take away anything else from today, if you're a new pilot and you've never had any instrument training, I don't advise you to go out and do instrument training before you're private. Get your private done. We have one of our ground school members who's working on a private. He's only a few hours in and he's been in the instrument rating course making comments. And I'm like, okay, you might want to back up a little bit. Get your private done before you jump into the instrument training. Okay? We don't recommend that either. If you're not done with your private yet, I wouldn't be worried about instrument training right now. You know, you should get a few hours with your instructor on basic instrument flying and how to level out the wings and know what to do if you get into trouble. But let's go back and check out some comments here and see what time it is. Is. And I'm just thinking that we're probably going to want to do a part two. Okay, let's see what we got. Do I have a lot to catch up on, Gary.

As far as comments go.

Yeah.

You've got them on downsized up there. Do what the comments you have downsized up there.

Correct. I just kind of look to see where I was at. Do you know, is there many from when I left off? Let me back up here. Okay. Greetings from Germany. BK117. Dude, that's cool. I flew BK117 for two and a half years. That helicopter is the heavy duty truck of helicopters. I love that aircraft. I know they're old now and people are phasing them out, but BK 117, what a cool helicopter. Greeting from Germany. Great channel, great content, Jason. That's what I'm getting ready to do. Oh, 58 Taz, make your minimums. Okay. I mentioned that earlier. Let me go a little farther here. What time you got, Gary? It's the time to start rolling things up.

You got about four minutes to the hour mark.

Oh, man. Well, then we're going to start. We're going to start wrapping it up. I think we'll probably see what else there is to talk about. Go over any other questions that we may not get to. So we can get answers back to.

People, but left with the step by step procedures for if it happens.

Right. I wouldn't want you to ever try to learn just today from what happens. You need to go out and do it. But if you ever got into it, you're going to need to keep the wings level. And you may have one of two choices. It's going to be climb, call for help. You may be able to do a 180 turn and get out of it. But we caution pilots to, you know, there's talk in the industry that you can get into trouble doing the 180 turn if you try to make it too fast and you're not comfortable and ready for it, that you may be a better option to start to climb and call for help. So depending on where you're at, descending, trying to ascend out of the clouds is not most likely the answer. It's going to be either. Climb, squawk 7700, get on ATC, call for help. Start calling for help on emergency frequency. If you are comfortable enough to make a 180 turn, first thing is to get the wings level, get everything under control and then start a 180 turn to get out of it. But again, I wouldn't want that just to be, you know, I wouldn't want that to be what you're going off of. You need to get out and do some training. All right, well, let's see. We want to back up and go. I just can't believe how much I rattled for an hour and boom, just we're almost done. So we're going to wrap it up so everybody can get moving on with their time. I want to go over again, you know, get our instrument course special offer, 20% off. It is IMC 20 off, correct, Gary?

That's it.

It's 20% off for either the first month of the monthly subscription or a yearly membership or an unlimited membership. That link is below the video. Depending on no matter where you're at, wherever you're watching this video, the link is nearby. We encourage you to do that. Please like share comment on this video. Let us know how it went. What else you'd like to see? Kind of plan on maybe part two for next week along with maybe something else. So let's plan on signing up. Got anything you want to add before we go?

No, it's all good stuff. Don't get yourself in imc. And if it does, don't panic.

Yeah, avoid it at all costs. Don't panic. And probably the best thing is to Start an easy climb and call for help because unless you're not in range where if you're too low to get someone. Gary learned just in that five hours of training, by the time we were done he was pretty comfortable that if he went out, he knows better than to get into it to start with. But if he did get into it, he knows to dial in the local approach, he knows to keep it level. Start a climb and call him and it would be admit. Don't just call up approach and go, oh, I think I'm not sure where I'm at. Can you give me some help? No, you would need to claim an emergency. You know, don't worry about FAA reports later and who's going to be mad at you and is the tower going to be pissed or is approach going to be mad? You know, it's about saving your life. So getting on calling for help would be the immediate relief because as long as you can fly by reference to the aircraft, they can guide you, they can give you the altitudes, they can give you you the headings and they can get you back to an airport so that you can get on the ground safely. So avoid it at all costs. Don't get into it. Get out and get some training. If you even starting to fly in iffy conditions or you think you're going to even think about it, go get yourself 5 or 10 hours of basic instrument training and get an idea of just what to do so you know you could handle if it ever happened. Alright, I'm ready for a break. Wow. I went on like crazy, but I'm kind of passionate about that one. I was passionate the five years I was flying ems. It was upsetting that helicopters just kept going down and people kept dying and it's still happening today and it's upsetting every time that I see it and I hear about it. And it's not just ems, but that's the one that's publicized and if people are prepared, that's the biggest thing. Brian was preaching yesterday. You know, Brian's been heavy into instruments the last six months or a year because he's done a bunch of instrument check rides and he was on top of it and he said the biggest thing is making sure people understand that they got to avoid it. And number two, if you don't, you have to be somewhat prepared. If you're not prepared for it and you haven't really had any training, the outcome is you're probably not going to survive it. It's probably not going to happen. All right. Thanks everybody for joining in. Like share. Subscribe to the YouTube channel for us. Please appreciate that very much. Leave us your comments and we will see you next Tuesday.