Preparing Gear & Electronics R-44 Cross Country Just Grabbed A Camera And...

Man, this place is an entire mess. As I getting ready for a big long cross country, I want to point out some things. Been charging a bunch of stuff and going through my gear and I want to tell you we're getting ready. We did a bunch of moving. Everything looks different. The Hogs wall of fame has been here in the center of the hangar for a while. So we moved it yesterday. We spent some time to come up with what we want to do once the aircraft arrives. We just decided to utilize the north end of the building that you really never see. And now we got all seven panels together and they're not quite tightly fit yet because once we get the aircraft in here, we'll be figuring what's the best way to get in and out and rotor blades and all that kind of stuff. A lot of things to think about going after an aircraft. I have done cross countries before where I had a guy that used to have me move his instruments once a year, twice a year and he'd call me like on a, you know, two o' clock in the afternoon, hey, can you take my helicopter to Florida? When today. And I've done these last minute throwing stuff together. Man, that's not the way to do it. Gonna have a brand new look. Gonna be able to film in all kinds of different directions. Yellow car by the yellow helicopter. That's gonna be kind of cool. I was thinking I should make a list of everything you need to do when you're going across country. And I, I didn't make a list. I just been going through my mind trying to think of everything. I made sure I got a set of wheels reserved down there so that when I get back I can get inside. Because I, I checked in my dolly, it'll be too tall going in and out. It's going to like almost be scraping the top of the hanger door. And then if blades are moving up and down, that would just be hassle. So I got wheels. So I've been charging everything. Gonna go over here and open a new headset in a little bit. Been working through the cross country flight planning. Got it on my iPad, got it on my iPhone. There's a GPS and a helicopter. And yes, I will probably pick up a paper chart if I can find some. Just because old school and I like that. So today I dug out the good old fancy simple kitchen timer, put a new battery in it, making sure it's ready to go. I have wore a watch in the past. I'm not currently wearing a watch. Could use my phone, not sure what the aircraft has. Nice to just have something like this. You can boom. Sit down again. Fresh battery. I check to make sure it's working. It's just nice. You can start, stop, lay it right there in the floor. Find a place to mount it. One set of headsets made sure I got batteries in it. Been working through the different cameras I'm going to take. Unloaded my heavier stuff. Going to do all GoPro stuff for the trip. And when we meet down there, might meet a hogs member while we're there. That could be kind of cool. So I'm just going to take one bag because you always want to go light, right? You want to be light on a cross country trip and you don't want to be taking a bunch of stuff with you. So I got to clean this out from heli expo but I've finished cleaning it out. But most important there's my documents, my pilot's license, my CFI, my, my medical, my last flight review which was R44 flight review all. Everything that I need to be current is right here in this little envelope. And the reason I'm keeping it in there is because it's. Rather than have it thick in my wallet, risk losing it, lose my wallet, whatever. I won't be losing this bag. I will be covered. It will be in my bag. My bag will be with me at all times. Of course because just take one bag on the trip. Again to cross country trips you always want to try to be light as you possibly can. We hope to go down in a day, do some test flying. Everything good, fly it home. However, we'll take some backup stuff in case we gotta be in the hotel, you know, the bare necessities. So you can take a shower and brush your teeth and have some deodorant and a couple of fresh T shirts maybe. But I'm gonna travel real light. One bag. So I have my bows. I gotta make sure I have before I go. This is airplane. So I do have the adapter. So that's one thing I'll do is make sure I have my adapter to go to the single plug headset. I did called, I did call down there and said hey, I want to make sure this is standard single plug helicopter. Because you go on a trip sometimes and there isn't headsets there. You're planning on being there or you take your own equipment and the. Your equipment doesn't match what's in the aircraft because you know instrument like uses airplane jacks. And then you got that other funny five Star looking thing. So I called to make sure that it is a standard helicopter single plug. So I will find that it's over here. Now we're talking about it. I'm gonna find that when I go through all my GoPro stuff so we can record audio on the way home. That's one thing I gotta do yet is put together the wires, make sure everything's in there. But I wanted to show you this real quick. I've only bought one set of headsets in my life. The Bose I had was given to. I've actually had two bows given to me over the years and the first one got away with a student who never brought it back because he was my buddy and oh I'm just gonna borrow it for a little bit. Huh. 10 years later, 11, 12 years later, I never got it back. So anyway, so I have one headset. I know it's gonna work. I need another headset. So I ordered one. So this is new for me. The only time I ever bought one for myself I bought an el cheapo. It was 20 years ago and I just bought something that was like a hundred bucks and I was proud of it. It worked good and it was comfortable. But guess what? Didn't last long. I wanted one quick. I wanted to get it here before the weekend so I could check it and make sure. So yep, I went for the standard old David Clark. I'm not super picky. I want something that works. Biggest thing is I want to make sure that it is the standard helicopter plug. Yes. Okay. Of course I've worn David Clark headsets over the years. No great love is just seem like an okay price and I could get it here faster. Amazon that's that people ask me a lot. Oh I had set to you here's your favorite. I don't really care if it's comfortable and it works so many times. You'll get somewhere and you'll get some crappy headset in a rental aircraft or training aircraft and they're uncomfortable or the the mic's not tight, it keeps dropping on you. I just want something that's comfortable and that the mic is tight and everything works good Standard all David Clark. So what else am I thinking about? Am I current? Yes. As we just kind of covered my documents are in the bag qualified for the aircraft had a flight review in January have my licenses in there and my medical in there and I went in there and checked it and I will check it again just because for some of us that are sometimes unorganized it's Easy to. You pull out a medical to get on and answer a question or do something, or you pull out your license, then you forget to put it back in. And then you wind up in a silly situation when you get FA ramp checked and you don't have. It happened to me flying ems. I don't know why I had it out at home on the table. My medical app. For some stupid reason, I'm flying ems. Luckily it was ifr. Surprise inspection from the FAA guys were awesome. We get to the end of the inspection, everything is good at the EMS base. Like, okay, let's find your medical or let's take a look at your medical and your license. Have my license come home on medical. Then I'm out in the car searching for it and one of the guys come out, went, you don't have it, D. And I'm like, I can't find it. And he's like, well, you know, you can't fly without it. And I go, I know. He goes, well, it's ifr, so it looks like you're out of luck or you're covered for now. And I got on the phone, somebody found it for me at home, ran it up to me and they told me, if you get it today and when we go vfr, you call us and make sure that we want to know you got it. So that happened. So just a little bit about the cross country. I know through the planning it's 342 miles. Been taking a look at that. I have my takeoff destination, my home destination. I've been doing the math on the fuel. I'm really conservative. I could probably comfortably make it halfway. Still have more than a half an hour of fuel. Halfway home, probably more. Well, way more than half. This is an overhauled helicopter. You never know. I'm on the conservative side. So I'm going to get in flight probably about an hour. I'm going to take off a full of fuel, of course, after checking weight and balance. And I'm going to go probably an hour. And I've went along here and there's a whole ton of little Kalash G airports. So that day, I think this is very important. I'm going to pick. There's several locations where there's several Class GS, right? Like in the same area. So I'll actually call one or two of them in that general vicinity where I want to stop and make sure, hey, you guys have 100 low lead today. Because here's the kicker. It might say they have 100 low lead, but I have landed somewhere and they were closed unexpectedly or the pump didn't work, the credit card machine didn't work and I have had to leave one location to go to another one and then you end up skimping on fuel to try to get to another location to get to another airport. And that sucks. So what I do, I'm super conservative. Yeah. Let's say we fly home at 100 knots. I know I can do it in about three hours and 40 minutes or so. Three and a three and a half hours. I'm going to go an hour into it, stop, look the helicopter over. Since I don't know it that well, I am going to do a test flight before we head home. And then about an hour into the flight, stop, take a break, get a snack. And then I know I've got full tanks again with plan on stopping again because just for fun, if you ever in the Cincinnati area there is a incredible place to stop. Cincinnati Municipal Lunken Field. Been there many times to get fuel and there's a restaurant right beside the FBO where you get fuel. So that is my plan. I want to take my time, be a little off course. But that way if I stop an hour in, then I'm going to stop again just because flying through Cincinnati is freaking incredible and it's right on the Ohio river. So, you know, depending on where the wind's at, you can come and fly in over the river to come into this airport. Freaking amazing. Cincinnati is absolutely beautiful. So then I'll top off again and boom, I'll be able to make the last leg of the trip and still have plenty of fuel when I get home. And I did sit at home last night because I have done those trips I mentioned earlier where somebody will call, hey, can you move this helicopter? Yeah. And that's so stressful when you just when you're doing it, you haven't taken a lot of time or maybe you're rushed. You're right, because somebody wants you to go and can you go today? So I have been through the up and down the route several times just looking things over, seeing what airspaces I'm going to have kind of giving myself an out in different places. I'm not going to do anything silly. I'm not going to take any chances. Of course I will be taking the no go button with us. If you're new to our videos, this is where it started when I was flying ems, flew the Vietnam era dude. And when he would turn down a call for weather, he'd go that was easy. And I loved that idea so much because it took off the. It just helped ease the pain when you had to say no. So I am taking a no go with us. Live to fly another day. Helicopterground.com Just because I'm gonna. I'm gonna pack that dude in there. We're gonna take it with us just because, like I told Heather to remind myself, we're not taking any chances. I'm going to, of course, want to get. Want to get back home. And that's just part of it, right? You always have to go with the mindset that what if you want to get home? And that pressure sometimes can be difficult. But I'm going into it. Hey, gonna go down, test fly. And I'm not even really checking whether. Because this is. These people want to meet me on that day just to make sure everything's good to go. So I'm gonna be there, do the flight test, and then if I have to sit for a couple days because the weather's crappy, then I sit and mess around for a couple days. That's the way it is. So what else am I not thinking of yet? My documents are good. I checked to make sure my numbers were right on the math on the fuel burn, how many hours I could go, how many miles I got to go. I just really spent some time with that because I don't want to stress. And I've done enough of stupid stuff and running low on fuel and trying to find a place totally sucks. And it can happen to you. You can have the best planning. But one of them happened one time where I was traveling cross country and I had everything planned out right. I stopped this little place where I stopped that often. Guess what? Pump wouldn't work. So then I'm like, okay. And I had to do the math to make sure I could get to another airport and still have the fuel reserve. And I did it. But I didn't have any. Didn't have any extra right. It was like landing there with just reserve. And I don't like that. I hate landing with just reserve. And then on my cross countries, I only like to fly about an hour, hour and a half tops. Anyway, I know there's brutes that'll get in a helicopter and fly hours and hours. I can't do it with my, you know, old back injury from getting ejected from a helicopter. After about an hour in a helicopter, I'm ready to take a break. So I'm super conservative and that's what I. Of course, I urge our members to do. We did have a member recently. I was really proud of him. He sent a picture or a little bit of a video he posted on Facebook and he's like, you see the video where he's flying, you see some low clouds. And he said, I made the no go decision to not continue on. And I went back home because my online instructor says live to fly another day. And I was like, awesome. So somebody's actually out there listening. That's cool. Took my advice, posted it on social media that he was on a solo cross country, saw some low land weather and he went, you know what? No negative. And he turned around, went back. So good for him. So there's just a lot to think about, you know, make sure all my stuff is charged. Back in the old days, we make sure you had spare change because you had to use a phone somewhere. But you know, pay phones are a thing of the past. Clothing. You know, there's a lot of places in the US Even that are very remote. And if you would have to stop, let's not say you even crash. Let's just say you had some kind of a warning light or caution light where you had to land out in the middle of nowhere, you couldn't make it to the next airport and you landed, you were legitimately in the middle of nowhere. And what if it's late in the day and it's going to get cold that night? I've seen so many people take off on cross countries without coats. Well, it's beautiful out today. It's like 70. And I was like, yeah, but we're going on a cross country and it's going to be like 35 degrees tonight. And ah, you know, no, take a freaking coat, take a hat, take a pair of gloves. You know, having those few things with you just in case. Because like I said, I know I've been over some areas in the U.S. where you go, holy cow, there is absolutely nothing out here. And if I get stranded, what am I going to do? So at least if, you know, you can make it overnight and have something to try to keep warm, you know, again, you could. Your battery could go dead. You could land somewhere where there's no cell service. That could happen. Have some kind of a plan on what you're going to do. I'm glad summer's coming. But flies, what else? Oh, flashlight. Final approach customer Kyle N. Came last summer to do a final approach course and he gave me a cool little flashlight and I thought, you know what, I'm going to take this dude with Me because I plan on flying only in the day. But you know, on pre flight or inside a hangar, even out some, some sometimes you can be looking in, it can be hard to see something even in daylight. So I thought, you know what? Rather than a bulky flashlight, I'm taking this little dude, he gave this to me. So it's got, not only got a flashlight on, but it's got a little red flashing light on it too. So I could be using that to signal somebody while I was out in the middle of nowhere and waiting for help. But I thought, I'm just going to wear that dude, have it right over me. I don't know what else to think about or talk about other than that. That's all the main stuff. If you're thinking of something I hadn't thought of yet, put it down below because I'm not done. I'm going to keep plugging away, keep packing, thinking, charging, making sure I have every little thing that I need. I still have a day or so, so I'm getting ready early. Unlike a lot of things I've done in my lifetime where I waited till the last damn minute because that's kind of person I am. I've changed as I've gotten older. And I'll tell you what, taking the time on a cross country trip to really just look over everything is so important because this way I can leave with confidence. And if I get down there and I forgot something, I don't think I am, I think I got everything. But taking your time investigating where you're going to go, where are you going to stop on the way. And again I recommend calling places you know, ahead of time to see about, make sure that they're going to be there and their fuel pumps are up and running. Let me know what you think down below. Look forward to the next video because there's going to be lots of cool stuff. We're going to be announcing flight training packages coming up, time building, fac, among others. Stay tuned, we'll see you next video. Peace out.