Love 'em or Hate 'em? Robinson Helicopters Controversy

Let's talk about the Robinson, the Robinson haters, how vicious people are about Robinson. But then on the flip side, there's people that actually love Robinson. And I want to talk about that just for a little bit because we're going to do a series of videos that I've been wanting to do for quite some time. It's been over 10 years since I did videos on the Robinson safety tips and notices. And these are good for any helicopter you fly pretty much no matter what. But people immediately snoot their nose over Robinson helicopter. And this, to me, at this point, with my years in the game, it's really kind of a funny argument. And I'm going to tell you where, where some of my first reasoning comes from, because I started out flying Switzer, Enstrom Robinson got a taste of everything. And you pretty soon, pretty soon learn how, man, you got people on one side that just hate Robinson and they just bash them all the time and they're death traps. And then you got people that just absolutely love them. So having the opportunity to fly R22 for all my ratings, have the opportunity to get to fly R44 later and currently fly an R44 that we operate. And also getting to fly Schweitzers and instruments and Bell and EC135 and BK117, among all the stuff I've ever flown. You know, I've stayed teaching in a long time, and somewhere along the way I heard a statement from our examiner made probably 15 years ago, and this is where it first kind of started to make sense to me. He said, well, when you hear somebody bashing Robinson, that person has 10 hours or less in the aircraft and Robinson helicopters. So now with my time in the industry, teaching in all the different ones, having lots of experience between them, I realized how much that examiner was correct. Just, it's just an observation, right? It's not really a. You know, it's just what he's observed in his many, many years in and around him. And now I feel the same way, right? When you hear somebody bashing a Robinson, you know, pretty much that person probably has 10 hours or less, a lot of time they've never flown one, or maybe they've just got in and sampled one one time, done a flight or two. Just like yesterday we did the video on the T bar. And I like a lot of the comments that we've got. Like one guy said, hey, man, sorry I can't agree with you on this one. I just don't like it. That's fine. Right Everybody's entitled to their opinion. But then you have other people that jumped in there and said, you know, like you. I hated that T bar in the beginning, but now I love it. And somebody made a comment that I, that I didn't think about when I did the video yesterday. Another thing that's kind of handy is once you realize that when you're, A lot of times you're climbing in a helicopter and you got to put your leg over the cyclic, not a big deal, but lifting the cyclic up, sliding in, pulling it down to where you like it, that specifically actually makes it get in easier to get in and out to not make the video too long. The point is, my time in the industry, I think the Robinsons are great. And I, and, and I go back to what my examiner said. Again, a guy's been doing this for 35 years who says people that bash them normally have 10 hours or less. You just don't know that much about them. You know what you've heard. And I went, luckily went to the Robinson factory way back. It was like in the late 90s. And Robinson is up front when you go to the factory. At least they were back then. I'm assuming they still are. Or even more today. When you go to the Robinson factory safety course, they explain to you in the beginning, they say, this is why the helicopters weren't making it. This is where the problems with our aircraft in the very beginning. This is the problems with training and poor instruction in the beginning and how people didn't understand a lot of the things that were trained about low G and other things as well. And when they lay it out for you and they show you the math from where they were to where they are now, it's staggering in how much the safety has improved over the years. My take on it is once you learn more about them and you realize that if you do the proper maintenance and you fly them the way they're intended to be flown, and you stick to good old private pilot basic 101 with the things that were taught early on, you're probably never going to have a problem with the Robinson. A lot of times when they get wrecked and these bad things happened, a lot of times it is maintenance. A lot of times the pilot was hot dogging, doing things they shouldn't be doing. Sometimes it could be a random maintenance thing, but any aircraft, you can have that. Anyway, I just wanted to sum up that whole conversation with it. To me, at this point, it's a fun conversation. I don't get mad about it anymore. And if you don't like them, you don't like them. But again, if you're a hater, probably, probably most likely you don't have that much time in them. Another thing that my examiner said back about that same time and even recently we heard somebody asking, well, if you were going to fly one for yourself, a helicopter, what would you pick? And his answer is immediately, 100% hands down. Robinson, coming from a guy who flies and trains people in multi million dollar twin engine aircraft, all kinds of different aircraft. And there goes the goddamn furnace again. Oh, well, we'll finish it up real quick with the furnace running. He's like hands down to rabbits because they just don't break. And you know, I'm an instrument fan, owned and operated instruments for years and I still like the instrument and would still love to fly one. However, I owned one and operated one for four. For four years. And I've been operating the R44 now going on two years, we've been operating this R22. And I'm saying, from what I see, they are a little easier to maintain and they're not as maintenance heavy as an instrument. It's a little easier to get them fixed. They don't require quite as much maintenance and the maintenance when it's done is less. And I can tell you that, hands down, from operating them myself and me, the guy writing the checks, the Robinson's a lot cheaper to maintain than an instrument, hands down. So we're going to do is we're going to reshoot the Robinson safety tips and notices. I did all these over 10 years ago and of course I look at a video I made 10 years ago and I'm like, oh my God, you know, I can't believe I was using that camera or that mic or whatever the case is. So I want to reshoot to freshen these up because we do have these inside our Robinson R22 specific section inside hogs and our R44 section inside hogs. A lot of times we've had members go, you know, you don't even promote your R22 and R44 courses. I'm just always talking about private commercial CFI. We have R22 and R44 courses with Inside Helicopter ln Ground School. And we last summer we did a bunch of updates to the R44 course. But the R22 course hasn't had any updates in a long time because we haven't had one available to us. So it dawned on me this morning, up drinking coffee, I'm like, you know what? Now that We've got an R22 here, this is the perfect time to go in and do some updates inside the R22 course. And so it was a very simple idea for me. Like, I've been wanting to reshoot safety tips and safety notices for a long time. It's been on the agenda of all the multitudes of projects that we want to do. And I thought right now, this is the one that I want to do first. Because this is good content for freebies on YouTube. Just people wanting to learn more. It's good for our members to have the fresh content updated inside the site. And I will reiterate again, people will snooze their snooze. People will snoot their nose immediately. Oh, it's a Robinson safety tip. A Robinson safety notice. Well, guess what? When you read through these, yeah, a few might be R22 or R44 specific, but most are not. And most of these things that you're going to cover you can apply to any helicopter that you're flying anywhere. Again, so you're going to snitch your nose immediately. You don't have to. These are still really good tips and notices. One other thing I want to add real quick, we get a lot of younger pilots getting into the industry, and they'll say, man, how can I get ahead of everybody else? Or how can I get that first job? How can I be better than the average instructor? I want to add this is one of those things that when we talk to people, go through the safety tips and safety notices. When somebody comes here from training around the country, I'll always ask them, have you been through safety tips and safety notices? And they'll usually kind of go, oh, yeah, well, yeah, I kind of look through them. Or sometimes they'll go, no. And I'm like, do yourself a favor, sit down and take the time to go through them. Because the safety tips and notices are written because of prior accidents and prior bad things that have happened with aircraft. Right? So you take what you learn from the past to help safety in the future. And I think that these are super, super duper tips. So this is what we're going to be doing in our next series of videos. We're going to be going through tips and notices. And I'm not going to read them to you, of course. I'm going to tell you what the notice is and then give you kind of the real world of what I may or may not have seen. Things have happened to me, things that have happened to other pilots that I know where, if they would have would have taken the safety tip or notice into consideration, that problem never would have happened and even possibly saved lives at times. So something else real quick. Private Pilot 101. If you're into helicopters, wanting to get to your private rating, right here's a free resource. We released this this year, Amazon number one bestseller free PDF down below. And the paperback copy is also available down below as well. And go check out helicopter ground school@helopterground.com that link is down below. We have a 24 hour test flight on the monthly options. 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So you can test it for 24 hours, no charge, use it for 29 days and decide it's not right for me, you ask for a simple refund and we refund. That's it. We don't make you fill out a question, we don't send you a survey. If you say I'd like a refund, we just issue the refund. Thanks and we'll see you next video. 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 I don't know. Why am I walking backwards? Because we thought this might be a new cool. I thought it's more fun to watch you worrying about falling over something walking backwards. Yeah, you're a lot more aggressive when you're going this way too. Why is it you're so slow when we go that way, when you're backing up? But I'm going to come around the corner, so it's more natural Now I come because I see that in videos where I can tell they in the editing they didn't cut out the.