Private Pilot: You Will NEVER Get The License Without Ground School

All right. Impromptu video without the ground. It's a no go on getting a helicopter license. And I say license because people don't know that it's called certificate or called rating once you get the license. People that are brand new to this don't understand. A lot of people call it license. So this is for people that are brand new. If you've already got a license in a helicopter or a rating, however you want to call it certificate, you know what happens as far as the ground school needed to get the license, get the rating. Okay. So I'm Kenny Keller with Helicopter Line Ground School and we've been talking amongst ourselves in the last couple months. We have a someone new on the HOGS team who I've been mentioning lately, Daniel Hastings. He's one of our HOGs member support specialists and he works with our one on one programs for members. And the feedback he's been getting since April is people call us up because they're completely confused. They go around the Internet and try to find information on, you know, how to pursue their training and they feel like it's very unclear. A lot of schools don't mention the ground school. They don't always give the cost to ground school. So people end up frustrated later because they weren't explained all that in the beginning. So for those schools that are very clear and up front to potential students, great, because we know there's plenty of you out there, then there's a lot of schools that just, hey, it's a 40 hour package. And you know, you fly the 40 hours in the aircraft and you get your license and life is great. And Brian Rutledge and I, our operations manager, were just discussing this at length this week how no matter what you do, you have to do the ground school. And that's one thing that Daniel said is people just, they're not explained how this works. So several ways you can do ground school, you can do it on your own. You can have a great big pile of books and you can sit at home and you can study and read and do all of it on your own. You can do one on one ground school with your instructor, where you're paying the instructor anywhere from say 30 bucks an hour to upwards of 70, $80 an hour, depending on where you're going. So you're sitting down at a table one on one, paying someone to teach you ground school. There's other apps and things out there underneath Internet. We have helicopter online ground school where we help you learn the knowledge. But like Brian said the other day, without the ground school, there is no license. Right. And that's not always explained. So that's kind of the point of this video is if you're new to this, you have to do a certain amount of ground and we call it ground school. Which again, ground school could be you doing it on your own. We've had members. I had a guy refund one time, he said, you know, after entering ground school, I realized I could just do all the study on my own with all the FAA materials. And I said, yes, absolutely you can. A person can study for majority of this on their own if they, if they choose to take that method. Everybody learns in different ways. So whether you want to use one on one with your instructor at your flight school, you want to sit and read books on your own, you want to get on YouTube and chase different videos up and down trying to find all the information you're going to need. There's numerous ways to get the ground, but the fact is you have to do it. The point of, oh, buy a 40 hour package and you have your license. That's not normally how it works. Normally a person takes more like 50 hours. 60 hours could be more. It took me 88 hours to get my private pilot. Why? Because the guys I was flying with in two different locations, Indianapolis and Chicago, and they were awesome. But what we do, I'd show up and we'd fly. Show up and we fly. Show up and we fly. And I'm into the training 40, 50 hours and a new instructor comes to a flight school down in Indy. And he calls me up, says, hey, I haven't seen you, haven't been here in a while, come down and do a flight. So I go down to fly this weitzer and we go out, we have a great flight. And he goes like, man, you are ready for your private pilot test. I'm like, really? He's like, yeah. And I'm like, awesome. And he's like, well, so what'd you score on your written test? And I'm like, written test? Oh, I haven't done that yet. And he's like, oh my God. You're this far along in the training and you don't have your written test done yet? I'm like, no. And he goes, okay, well how's your ground school? And I'm like, what do you mean ground school? He goes, well, you've been flying and doing ground with your instructors you've been flying with in Indy and Chicago, right? And I'm like, no, we're always just flying. He's like, oh, gosh. He goes, we were out in the aircraft. And he's like, what do you know about clouds? He just starts throwing some ground school questions at me. And I'm like, you know, there's some clouds up there in the sky. I didn't know. I didn't know that much about clouds. And he was like, oh, my God. We have a serious amount of a bunch, serious bunch of work to do here. So I started doing ground school with this structure, this instructor. After I'm 40 or 50 hours in, we do a bunch of ground. He schedules me a check ride. And because I'm not 100% confident on the ground school, I failed the oral portion of the private pilot check ride. I'm not blaming the instructor. I'm not blaming. It's my fault ultimately, right? I. I was so freaked out and so stressed. But if I would have been getting the proper ground school from the beginning. And my instructors have been saying, look, man, you're not gonna be able to take the test until your ground knowledge is solid, right? So anyway, make a long story short, I then failed my first test at probably wherever I was at by that point, 70 hours. Because I start learning the ground, working on the written, it gets drug out for months, and then I take a test and fail. So anyway, you gotta do the ground school. You're never gonna get the rating. That's it. And a certain amount of ground school has to be done, whether you're doing it on your own, one on one, whatever you can find on YouTube. Join our Helicopter Line Ground School. We've been online 10 years now. If you've never seen the Hogs Wall of Fame, we have a full huge, big wall plastered with all of our members from all over that we've helped get through the ground school. So you can sign up for helicopter all on ground school down below. I'll put a link down below for helicopterground.com Heather height is your member Concierge Heather is still available at 574-767-1797. You can call or text Heather seven days a week for simple questions. You know, questions about membership signups. And then we have Danielle Hastings, who is working with our one on one programs. We have a professional pilot program. We have, we have some expedited courses where like, you want to be, you know, a ground school member where you can be going through the courses. And then we hook you up with Brian Rutledge who's going to kind of like hold your feet to the fire and get you through In a like certain amount of time, like I got to do this rating and I got to get it done in three months. We have a program for that. You say you want to be a professional pilot, you want to go all the way through to CFI and get out, start working the world as an instructor. We have a professional pilot program. And then we have some different options that Daniel has come up with. And he has proposed several different membership options and I've given him the authority to like go ahead and work with these different options, Daniel, figure out what works for people. And again, this whole video was inspired by the feedback that Daniel's been getting from people. Frustrated because they just don't understand what ground school all about. They have a hard time finding the information. They're not always told up front exactly what the ground is, what it's going to cost them. What's it going to cost you? Let's say you're going to do it one on one with your instructor. Let's say it takes 30 hours. Take whatever your hourly rate is at your flight school times 30 and there's going to be the number that you're going to see for what it's going to cost you for the ground school. Everybody's different. Everybody learns in different forms and fashions. That's why there isn't one simple answer. When somebody says, well, how am I going to get to the training? How should I do the ground school? There's a lot of different variations depending on each individual person. And I say this all the time. There are flight schools that will literally go, oh yeah, the ground is a self study program. And they go, here's the book. You know, throw a helicopter flying handbook at you, read the book, that's all you do. You know everything you need to know. It's not like that. It's way more entailed. It's like a small college course. I wouldn't even say small college course. This is the other thing that Brian and I talk about. The amount of information that you have to know to become a private pilot is staggering. It's a huge, huge, huge amount of information to learn. So update on the private pilot study guide. We've got a bunch of feedback. We have two other experts working with Brian, going through, checking every question, going through this thing. And we had a bunch of people wanting it already. It will be ready soon. But trust us, we just don't want to just throw it out there until we are 100% happy and confident. So there's now five of us total that are going through this thing page by page, step by step, and making sure it's going to be the best product we can put out there. This is going to be. This is basically possible questions. You could be asking a check, right? And there's over 400 and this and there's more, Right. But this is like the meat. So this is going to be for the people who are hardcore serious, want to sit down, do some reading, test their knowledge with questions and then go through the same section and see how you did on the answers. And it's gonna be a cool deal and people are excited and we're excited too, so. And hey, if you become a member of ground school, once you pass your rating and send us a picture, we send you the hogs no go button. It's not on Live to fly another day helicopterground.com There's a problem in our industry with people losing their lives because they take off and fly into bad weather. And that's the story behind the no go. So if you'd like any information about signing up, go to helicopterground.com you can see our different membership options. You can call Heather or Text Heather at 574-767-1797. You can set up a time to speak with Daniel. I'll put Daniel's book a call link down below where you can pick a certain time that works for you and Daniel will give you a call. So we've got a lot of different options to help you get started on the career or your training, or whether you just got started or you're partway through the private pilot and you're realizing, wow, this is a boat load of material. So go to those links down below. And we've always got Specials running@helopterground.com too, and we've got a nice one going on right now, so go to helicopterground.com to check it out. We'll see you next video. Peace.