Kenny Keller walks through a student's first hovering lessons, breaking down the three controls (collective, pedals, cyclic) and why smooth inputs matter. Hovering typically takes 3 to 5 hours before it starts to click, and students often grip too hard and fight pendular motion without realizing it.
Hello, I'm Kenny Keller, the creator of Helicopter Online Ground School and the author of the Amazon number one bestseller, Helicopter Checkride. What we have for you today is some hovering with one of our new students. This is one of our instructors out. This gentleman's in his. Maybe his second or third lesson, and he's just getting his introduction to hovering. So I thought many of you would like to see what it looks like from the outside when somebody's learning to hover. Maybe you're new to this and you're getting ready to give it a try, or maybe you're already flying a helicopter and want to see what it looks like outside and remember back what it was like when you first started to learn. The whole trick to learn to fly these things is smooth control inputs. And when we start you out, like in this gentleman's case, we let you work the collective for a little bit, we let you work the pedals for a little bit, let you work the cyclic for a little bit, and then we start putting those together. And like in this video right now, I believe he's probably working a little bit with the collective. Now they're working with the pedals. And as the flight goes on, usually we'll give you a little more. We'll then double up and say, okay, now you got the pedals and the collective, and we kind of mix it up like that. And at a certain point, as you get more on your plate, more things to do, and get more tired throughout the lesson, things just start getting uglier as your flight goes on. But this is totally normal. Learning to hover one of these things is one of the hardest things that you're probably going to ever do in your life. And in the beginning, when you first start to learn, you think, oh, my God, I'm never going to get this. This is just too flipping hard. But the more you do it, the more you practice it, the better you get. So just go into it with the mindset that, you know, I'm probably gonna struggle. This is gonna be kind of hard. Probably gonna take me somewhere between three to five hours to start getting a handle on the hovering. You know, maybe it's gonna be a little bit less, maybe it's gonna be a little bit more, but this is gonna be the struggle again. This is the normal, this is what you see. And it's kinda interesting for me to stand by and watch one of my instructors out teaching somebody, because I know how scary it looks on the outside, but when you're the one on the inside, when You've been doing it for a while. You just get a feeling, you know, how far you can let your student go before you're gonna take the controls and, you know, have him relax and take a break. Like in this right here, they're coming in for their approach. They took a little break, went out, went around the pattern, break up. The monotony of the learning to hover. So the key is really it's learning smooth control inputs. When we're learning, we all get a monster grip. You know, even those of us have been flying for a while. Maybe we transition into a different aircraft. We've never flown before and it's common for us, even though we've been flying for a while or a long time. You know, you get into a new aircraft and you find yourself kind of getting a monster grip on the controls and you have to go, hey, just relax. It's a helicopter, they fly the same way. It's smooth control inputs. There's no reason to get crazy on the controls. One of the things that you'll learn about is pendular action. And you can see that in this video. Anytime that they're out there, as it starts to move, it'll start swinging. It'll go forward and then it swings backwards. Maybe it goes to the left and then it goes to the right. That is what we call pendular action. And that is a normal thing that you're going to go through when you're learning to fly these things is you're going to just be swinging that aircraft. Swing, swinging left, swinging right, swinging forward, swinging back. So there's a little insight into what it takes to learn to hover a helicopter. We have a lot of fresh video with the NSTROM and the Jet Ranger going into our helicopter online ground school. We're doing a lot of cool stuff there. So if you're interested in finding more about our training, go to the link below this video helicopterground.com Click on that to go to our site and please give us a like and. It.
