Kenny Keller (speaker) explains the difference between flight time and ground school for helicopter private-pilot training. He clarifies that the FAA-style 40 hours refers to flight time (dual instruction in the helicopter), while ground school is separate one-on-one classroom/instructional time to learn required knowledge and use of books; its required duration varies by student ability and availability.
Hi again. I'm gonna back up just a little bit. This is number three. And what I wanted to do here is explain ground school. I started off talking ground flying, and maybe if you're new, I don't want that to be intimidating if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say ground. The question came up on my. On the. After I posted, the first question was, does 40 hours, is that flying? Is that ground? What is exactly is that? Well, the 40 hours is 40 hours of flight time. That's dual instruction in the helicopter with an instructor. Now, the ground part, which is what we call ground school, we say ground for short. And basically ground school is one on one with your instructor. We teach you the things that you need to know to get the helicopter rating. We give you the books that you need. We don't give you the books. We help you get the books that you need. We explain how to use the books, and we do one on one ground, meaning we teach you the things that you need to know. And people want to say, well, hey, how long does it take? How much ground school am I going to need? That completely is based on a person's own abilities. The easiest way for me to explain it is from experience. And my very first student was a state trooper and he was an airplane instructor. And he was sharp guy and knew how to study and knew what it took. So he said, look, I don't want to spend a bunch of time doing ground school. I want you to show me what I need to know. I'll go home, I'll study, I'll read, and I'll come back. And when I come back, I'll know the material. And he did that. And we got him through the rating in a very short amount of time. And we did it with not a lot of ground school between the two of us. Then I have another friend of mine that I taught in Cleveland. Doctor friend, nice guy, smart as a whip. And we did a lot of ground school because he's a really busy doctor. And so when he had time off, he liked to come to the airport. And he would come whether the weather was bad or not, which is another thing. Come in for your lesson even if the weather is bad and do ground school. And he would do that. He came to the airport regardless. And a lot of times in Cleveland, the weather was bad. So we would do ground school. And basically we covered everything that he had to know for his private pilot rating. We did it and we covered it, every single thing. So. And you know, how many hours do we have? We had a ton of hours. But he liked it and he enjoyed it and, and that's how he wanted to proceed. So ground is going to take however long it takes. It just depends on your own abilities. And I keep mentioning we all have know other things in our lives and family, work and other things. So it depends on how much time you have to put into it, basically. So anyway, yeah, that's it for now. We will catch you in the next video. Thanks.
