Pilot Weather Go, NO GO Decision Making Can KILL You!

All right, day three. Live to fly another day helicopterground.com no fancy presentation today because this is one I'm passionate about and I can just roll with. This is our third video in a series of videos about getting people ready for checkrides. We have 72 weather questions inside the study guide. Weather can kill you and weather will kill you if you don't make the right decisions. Don't have your own personal minimum setup. And the examiner is going to definitely hit weather on the checkride. Now, do they get heavy into what levels of the atmosphere are and what it is? At what level are you at at 60,000ft and all that? No. As a helicopter pilot, they want to know that you're going to be able to make good decisions. You understand weather and understand icing, fog, thunderstorms, those things are going to kill you. So we're going to get right to it. We're not going to mess around. I just sat down with Heather this morning. We're sitting on a couch doing our thinking for the morning and her habit's in here today because she drove home yesterday. We looked at the weather. I'm like, oh, fine, you're going to be all right. And I misjudged it. She was almost home. She couldn't freaking see. And she was so freaked out when she got home last night. And I said, think about spatial disorientation in an aircraft. It sucks in a car or a Jeep. When you get into actual zero visibility, that's scary. As scary as hell. But you can stop and pull over beside the road, pull in a parking lot in an aircraft, you can't do that. So think about if you've ever been out in a blinding snowstorm in your car. Could you imagine going inadvertent IMC or zero visibility in a helicopter in snow? Get where I'm going here. So let's get right to it. We're going to go right through these questions again. I sat down at a 72, just went, yep, that'll kill you. Yep, that'll kill you. I picked the ones that I think are relevant and the first one I know is relevant because you're going to. Examiner is going to ask you, you're going to see it on every single written test. And it's so important because the question is every physical process of whether is accompanied by or is the result of. Write that down. I'm going to go through the questions. Grab your piece of paper. If you're legitimately interested in passing your checkride and testing out your knowledge, write it down right now. Take out a piece of paper and write it down. The next one I picked is what is wind shear? Okay, very important one. What is wind shear? If you don't understand what wind shear is and where it happens and how to look for it in a weather report? Next up, where does wind shear occur? Do you know? Write it down on your piece of paper. Next, I picked. That can kill you. What is a metar? This is a very simple answer to this one, but are you good at reading metars? This is three weeks before the checkride. You don't understand metars. Go review them now because most likely the examiner is going to pull out a metar and have you read a metar? You got to understand the metars in order to make a good weather decision. No go decision. Let's see what else we got here. What is a sigmet? Do you know what a sigmet is? Do you know what a convective segment is? Do you know what's involved in those in this particular question and I'll get to why it revolves to that white stuff that's melting falling off of Heather's jeep right now. What is a convective segment? Do you know what it is? And think about when the examiner asks you that at the table, can you give the examiner a quick description of what a convective segment is? This one you're going to hear on every single checkride. What temperature, dew point spread will be likely. I'm sorry, we're going to no editing on this video because we're going to get through this. We got a lot to do today. What temperature dew point spread will likely cause fog to form? Okay, this is a must. You absolutely have to know this. Three weeks away. You should know this. And if you don't get it into memory now write it down. Do you know it? Next one. How does advection fog form? I guarantee you 100%, without a doubt an examiner is going to ask you about fog. It is going to happen because what happens if you don't understand fog and how it forms? It'll kill you. Okay? That's one of the big reasons why there's an epidemic of EMS helicopter crashes. Guys flying inadvertent, flying into the fog, flying into the clouds. Next, every check ride, they ask you this. What three things are needed for a thunderstorm to form? Pretty much that one I'm going to say 90%. The next one 99%. This is a question they might likely answer, but they will ask you. Every private pilot I'VE ever checkered, I've ever sat in, they've asked this question, what are the three stages of a thunderstorm? You should be able to go click, click, click. Every single private pilot checkride I've ever sat in, they have asked this question as an EMS pilot for our 135 checkrides, they would ask us this question. Got to know it. If you don't know it, get ready for the proper answer. What two conditions are necessary for structural icing flight to occur? This is in Hoggs video 17.14. Oh yeah, by the way, in the study guide Brian puts in when a lot of time where there's a video inside hogs that relates to the question, he puts the number of the video in there inside the private pilot. So you could go back, review that video if you'd like so that you could Go to video 17.14. Unless it's changed. We'll have to have to check on that. Okay, let's keep going. Write these down. How are you doing? I Hope you're doing 100%, but if you're not, you're not ready for private pilot. What happens to the four forces of flight when icing occurs to helicopter? There's four things that are going to happen to the aircraft. This is important and I've told the story about an icing condition I got in. Luckily I survived it. I'm not going to bore you with the story. You need to understand icing. What happens to the four forces of flight when icing occurs to a helicopter? Next one, you're going to get asked this one on a checkride and you're going to see it on your written test. If you haven't taken the written test yet, you should be at three weeks away. If you're dicking around now with three weeks to go and you haven't done your written, then you need to get on the ball and get it done. What are three icing types? There are three of them. I'm 95% sure. Examiner's going to ask you that one on the private pilot checkride. If it isn't committed to memory yet, you got a couple weeks to do it. If you're legitimately getting ready to go, what are your personal weather minimums? Jot those down. Maybe you don't have them yet. I recently had a member who passed a checkride and said, hey, I told the examiner my personal minimum was three miles and a thousand feet. And I said, that's good, great. But you know what? Probably ought to be a Little higher for a new private pilot. Three miles and a thousand. I think as a new private pilot you need to go a little above three miles and a thousand. That's just my personal opinion, but I can tell you as an EMS pilot, our minimum was 802. I put my own minimum as an EMS pilot at three miles and a thousand at basic VFR and nobody complained. The crew didn't complain, the hospital didn't complain. They found other things to complain about, but they didn't complain about my decision that if it wasn't three miles and a thousand feet, I wasn't going. Because here's what happened. The weather report might say 3,000 or 3 miles, 1,000ft, and you get out in the real world and it's not what it's reporting. And then all the little areas between reporting stations, it might be three miles here and three miles there. But between here and that place you're going, it might be a mile and a half. So I'm saying you got to be, you got to be conservative on these weather minimums. That's how you keep yourself alive. And then this might be the last one. This one's easy, but I want to give you personal insight on this one. What number do you call to talk with an FSS briefer, a flight service station? You need to know the number. Examiner's probably going to ask you that. But here, let me tell you something transparent. There has been at least one time that I know that I wanted to get home. Coming from Ohio to Indiana on the weekend from my flying job. They let me take an airplane home and I wanted to go and I wanted to go and I wanted to go and the weather was sucky. And I called flight service and they said vfr not, you know, not recommended an airline pilot that was a part time helicopter guy there with us. He's like, dude, I wouldn't do it. I made the decision to go ahead. I could do it. But I was in an airplane, right, needing to fly a little higher, got myself in spatial disorientation, almost killed myself. If the briefer says BFR not recommended, I wouldn't do it. Because that's what they're getting paid to do, is to give you a good report. So let's go back and go through the answers. So again, this is weather. This is what's going to kill you if you screw up. Hang on, I'm going to get back to the right place. So let's just run through them. The answers are every physical process of weather's accompanied by or as a result of heat heat exchange. When you understand that that right there is what helps you decipher all these questions that come up about weather. Remember, it always, always boils back to heat. Always. Every single time. If you are getting ready to take a written test, remember this during the written test, because if you apply that heat, you can answer a lot of those questions that you might not be sure of. Apply that. What is wind shear? Sudden change in wind direction, velocity over short distance. Okay, you got to understand the wind shear because this could legitimately kill you if you didn't understand what it was. Where does it occur? All altitudes and all directions. So you got to know where it's at. And these will show up in a weather report. You need to know how to decipher those. I've had plenty of private pilot applicants that didn't know what it was and where to find out the info. What is a metar? You should know it three weeks away. It's an aviation routine weather report. It's a surface observation at airport, valid for one hour and issued 55 minutes past the hour. Examiner is going to test you on metars. They have to. They're not doing their job if they don't. Because that's part of making the weather decision. Your area forecast, your metars, all the pre flight planning that you need to do to make a good decision to either go or not go. What is a convective sigmet? I circled this one for today because it's winter here I was telling you, Heather just about, you know. Well, not just about. She had trouble getting home last night. The closer she got to home, the worse the snow got. That's the same thing that happens to you in a helicopter. The closer you get to your destination, the weather always seems to get worse. It's just how it works. It's not like it gets better as you get close to home. You keep pushing yourself because you're almost there. And the weather gets shittier. Whoops. And you get a little closer and the weather gets suckier. That's the way it works the majority of the time. So convective segment issued for thunderstorms and implies severe or greater turbulence, severe icing, low level, low level wind shear, which is what I just mentioned. But the icing is why I picked this one out for today. Because for us here in the Midwest it's that time again where we got to make those good decisions. This One, the examiner 100% is going to ask you on a private pilot check ride what temperature Dew point spread will likely cause fog to form. It's within 3 degrees or less. That is an absolute must know if you didn't know it. Commit to memory now and never forget it. Back to the fog. I don't really. I've never really liked fog. I think fog seems like it's all the classes and it's kind of hard to learn. But you need to understand those questions not only for the written test, but the examiner wants you to understand. Right. This is the one that's going to kill you because it's a problem with visibility. How does advection fog form? Warm, moist air moves over colder ground or water and the temperature drops. Requires some wind for it to form. Okay, that's advection fog. What are the three things needed for a thunderstorm to form? Moisture instability and uplifting action. They might ask you that one on the private. This one they're going to ask you what are the three stages of a thunderstorm? Cumulus, mature, dissipating. They're going to ask. Cumulus stage is the start of the updrafts mature stage. Start of rainfall dissipating stage, rains itself out. Okay, and here we go again. Almost got killed once making the bad decision on this 1. What two conditions are necessary for structural icing in flight to occur? Hoggs video. 17:14 Aircraft must be flying through visible moisture. I just found a typo for Brian. This is moisture. Moisture and temperature is between plus 2 Celsius and negative 10 Celsius. Okay. This one is so important, the icing. And this is what I was telling Heather. The temperature was right last night. She was talking about it building up on her windshield and on her wiper blades. And I said if it had been 20 or colder, it wouldn't have been as bad. But because it was close to freezing, that's when that stuff is slushy and it sticks to your aircraft like it sticks to your vehicle. So anytime you're near freezing above or below, you need to be worried about icing. And I'm telling you, I'm not going to bore you the story because I have that video out there. It's on YouTube. It's scary. Okay? And then this one. Think about it. Hopefully you answered them. If not, you need to understand these. What happens to the four forces of flight when icing occurs to a helicopter? Lip decreases, weight increases, thrust decreases, drag increases. All four of those things are a problem. And as you get more and more into it and you get more icing, the more this becomes a problem. You can you know, reason through that. Why is that dangerous? Why will that get you killed? What are the three types of icings? Clear, rime and mixed. You've seen it on the written. If you've got that done, examiner probably gonna ask you on that one. I'd say 75 to 80% or more. Personal minimums. I already said write your own down, but be conservative. And especially with the examiner, the kid. I mentioned that. You know, I'm glad he passed his checkride, and I'm glad he was proud of his personal weather minimum. But I think for a new private pilot, three miles and a thousand is a little shy. I think those minimums need to be higher. And what number do you call to talk to? FSS Briefer, 1800WX Brief. I'm 99.9% sure they'll ask you that one. Who do you call? What's that number that you call? And when you call them for a briefing, listen to what they're telling you. And if they say VFR not recommended, just make live to fly another day. Helicopterground.com. that's it. That's the decision. So are we gonna just upload this? We're gonna go live, Heather. We're gonna go live. You want this live? Because we can render this up real quick. I think we were gonna go live. Are we doing the giveaway? Yeah, we're gonna give away. Yeah, let's go live. We're gonna edit this up, and then I'm gonna pop live right about. We haven't talked about. This is the third video of people getting people ready for check rides. And the far aim. I. I thought the last day, I'm like, you know what? I haven't hit the far aim yet because the pts, I've been beating that to death. Right? I'm gonna mention this every day till now to the end of this series of videos. Do you have a far aim? All nice and sit on the table? It's all pretty and pristine. And you've never opened it. Are you. Do you have that sitting there? And you're three weeks away from a checkride and you've never opened it? Then you need to open that thing up and get on it, okay? The far aim, you need to be good with it. You need to be familiar with it. Get in there, look stuff up quickly. I really don't care if you want the digital version or you want to get the paperback version or both. I think both is great. This is nice and handy. For a quick reference of a reg, I'm Assured a lot of examiners are probably fine with that. If you have it on your phone or your iPad or whatever, take the time to get used to it. Okay? Legend in the industry who did my private commercial, he harped on this a lot about the FAR aim. And he said, and he was an encyclopedia of helicopter knowledge. But he said, kenny, nobody knows that until entire book. I've been flying, you know, 40 years and I don't know that whole book. But you have to know how to look stuff up quickly when you need it. So we just had a member email me yesterday. He said, hey, I was looking for the study guide list for the FAR aim. It's in the beginning, in the first few pages. There's a very close to the beginning of the paperback here on this. Just go to study by certificate and then you can pick airline, transport, commercial flight, instrument, remote, blah blah, blah. So the study guide or study list in the FAR AIM helps the overwhelm of that, of that big book. It's telling you the sections that you should go through. And here's the other trick to the FAR aim. If you at least go through that study list in the FAR aim, it's going to take you a little time, but do you want to ace your checkride or do you want to half ass your checkride? If you want to ace your checkride, let me tell you what you need to do. Go through that study list and read every one of those regulations at least one time. You don't have to memorize them, you don't have to read them 40 times. But if you'll go through this study list for private pilot in the FAR aim, read through every one of those. Back in the day I took a little dot and put, just put a red mark on every page and everything that I had to cover. And I read through everything once. You'll be amazed at how much of that you can recall when it comes up in a conversation or even the checkride. Because you'll go, oh yeah, I've read that. And on the checkride, if you get stumped, you can tell the examiner, you know, he asked you a question or she asked you a question. And you go, I've read that and I've read that. In the FAR aim, know where you can go quickly find that because they like to see you look stuff up. So there's an opportunity. If the examiner asks you something, hopefully it's something you know, you just can't recall because we want you to know pretty much everything. But let's just say Something slipped through and you never heard of it. You should know it's either in part 43 for maintenance, part 61, how I get my license, part 91, how I lose my license, or NTSB830. It's going to be in one of those sections, most likely. If you're familiar with the FAR aim, you know how to quickly look stuff up. You can save yourself on the checkride and they want to see you look something up. Some examiners do anyway, the ones I've seen. So in the last few weeks getting ready, if you don't have a FAR aim, you're way behind. Get it, get one, download it, go to the app store, go to the bookstore. I buy a new fresh paperback copy every year at Barnes and Noble when I go to the go to to the mall. I like having both. If you have the FAR AIM and you haven't been looking through it and you're three weeks away, you need to get in that thing and be looking through it. I'm telling you. So getting through these check rights isn't rocket science. It's covering the basis and knowing how to all the use to use all the tools. The pts, the FAR aim, Helicopter Flying Handbook. We haven't harped on that yet. You better have a helicopter Flying handbook and you should be already working through it. If you're three weeks away and you don't have it, you need to order that thing and get it fast. Go to the FAA and get it for free with a free PDF. Helicopter Flying Handbook is the helicopter bible. So we're going to give away a study guide? Not study guide. We're going to give away no go button. It's going to be really simple. Live to fly another day. Helicopterground.com Again we talked about weather today. We gave you 14 questions out of 72. I picked meaty stuff. There are things in weather that you have to know for the written test. The examiner is probably never going to ask you some wild stuff about the atmosphere way up. As a helicopter pilot, we're never up there. But anything that revolves around getting killed and making a good weather decision is pertinent and you need to know. So what else was I going to say? Just review. Oh yeah, study guides down below. We'll hit that. And while we're waiting for somebody to give me the answer for the giveaway, we'll go look and I'll keep talking about oh still you got how you can get it or top 10 checkride tips. Free PDF and physical copy of this one. Here's All I want to give this away. We don't hardly ever give these away, but due to the topic today and weather and making good no go decisions, all I want you to do is type in chat, think as though you're a brand new private pilot. Yesterday you got your private pilot. Today is the day that you got a chance to go fly by yourself and you have to make a decision. I mentioned earlier in the video making good, conservative personal minimums. There is no right or wrong here. The first one I see that pops up, that I think is what I would say. I think that's a good personal minimum. You're the winner. So that's what I want you to type. What is your personal minimum? I want to hear a cloud clearance and visibility. And if first one that I look at, that I see in chat, I'm gonna go, okay, yeah, I'd go for that. And I'll give you a hand. As I already said, I think it should be higher than 3 and 1000. I just don't think for a brand new private pilot, you just got your license as you're typing in there, before I go over and look, Jerry Ventrello, the guy already mentioned, got my private. And he said, kenny, you have your private now. I got done that day, got my license on, walks out. He said, let me give you a little advice from my experience, longtime examiner legend. They write articles about this guy, everybody knows he's a legend. He said, you got your private pilot, be conservative in your decision making. And he also said, don't just go out the next day and start taking everybody and their brother out and just giving a thousand rides. He said you could certainly legally do that. But he said, take a little time getting comfortable by yourself with your new private pilot license. Get a few flights under your belt and go out and just enjoy it and have fun. Because there's the added stress of a passenger that he said it's legal to do it. But he goes, my advice is just go out and do a few flights as a brand new private pilot by yourself. Enjoy it. Get a little more confidence, breathe. You just passed the checkride. Great advice. So I'm gonna walk right around here so we can see what, what you got in chat. Nobody's nobody, nobody's really playing except for, okay, well I need, I need a cloud clearance as a visibility. I asked for both, so I need both. And we know there's a little bit of lag in this. Terry Ward. Five miles and 3,000. All right, I'll take that. Terry. I'll take that because you did the five miles visibility, three ceiling pretty good. I mean 3,000 is a pretty good ceiling. But again, you've always got me thinking about the underlying stuff. I like that you picked five for the visibility because trust me, three miles visibility sounds great. But when you get up there a lot of times you go, wow, is this really three miles or is this a mile and a half? So I'll take you on that one. I'll take five and three. Five miles and 3,000. You could bump that up a little bit on the ceiling, but I'll take that. I think that's a, that's acceptable. That's acceptable. And that's for your local area too, right? Be looking at your cross country trip, where you're going, what's the weather going to be where you get there. So Terry, email Heather. She's probably typing this already. Type that in the chat. Oh no, just email heather helicopterground.com with your address and Heather's going to ship you the no go button if you're new to us. I designed this because I flew with a Vietnam aeropilot in EMS and there was a lot of stress to making the EMS weather decisions. And we put stress on ourselves, we got stress from the hospital medical crew, so on and so forth. And the Vietnam era pilot, after he would take a flight he would check whether and he'd call dispatchback and go, I'm gonna decline due to weather. And he'd reach up, that was easy. And he'd hit the easy button. And I was like, you know, I love that. That was really cool way to help you feel better about that decision. And the medical crew, they hear it, that was easy. They know what's going on, right? They know you've just said no for weather. So I took that idea and created the HOGS no go button. It can be for more than just weather, but it's really designed for weather. It's a little treat. If you get one that you have one of these, take them out to your flight school and people got them. Send us a picture. It's been forever since somebody sent us a picture of an ogo. Every member that goes up on the HOGS wall of fame gets a no go. Rarely do we give them out. Today Terry got one that's special. But again, because of the decisions today or the topic of the good no go decision, I wanted to bring it out because of the snowy event last night with Heather and the whole weather topic. So that's the idea behind the no go button. Should Sharing with your flight schools. So down below you can get a link. Brian Rutledge was in chat. He may be gone now depending on what he's doing. He works remotely in California for us. He put this together over 400 pages. The questions we have in the link below, you'll be able to, when you click the link, you'll be able to see the amount of questions in each section. It's all listed out. You can get a free PDF the first chapter. You can also get the physical copy in the same link. They're side by side, so if you can't find it, just keep scrolling down the page. But we tell you a little bit about it. You can get the free PDF for the first chapter, you get the physical copy if you'd like. And for the free PDF we'll send you out emails for the list of videos in the series. So even if you sign up today, in a couple days you'll get the email for the first video, the second video, the third video. So that if you're going through this process of prepping for a checkride, you're going to get the other videos sent to your email so that you can follow along. Every couple days you'll get a video link that says, hey, today we're going to talk about weather. Next video we're going to talk about cross country. So that's the next section out of the study guide. So that links down below. And then we have, we got in a fresh box of these. After Covid for a while we stopped shipping and just let them sell on Amazon. We bought a whole box and Heather is now shipping these. There's a link down below where we, we bought the book. We're paying the shipping and handling to get it to your door. In the US we're looking at doing an international option, but right now it's just us only. But we'll look at creating a link for international because international shipping has went crazy. It's just horribly expensive. So we need a different link for that. Anything I need to cover any questions while you're in there? All right, all right. Brian's got it handled. Links are down below. Get ready to go and we'll see you in the next day or two for cross country planning. Peace out.