Student Almost Destroys Aircraft, Settling with Power

All right, we're going to do another video in response to a comment from yesterday. Yesterday we talked about what was it? I forget settling with no icing. I'm sorry, icing. And so we're doing 33 days total of mistakes. Majority of these things are going to be my mistakes that led to something bad or possibly bad and then hopefully we have a good outcome, you know. So here's the one I'll talk about selling with power, vortex ring state, whatever you want to call it. But this involves add on pilots and downwind landings. And our examiner will tell you as a helicopter pilot today, the one thing that's going to bite you in the ass is probably going to be selling with power. Right? And downwind landings are a no, no, you shouldn't do it. Fixed wing can get away with it a little easier than what we can. And that's why a lot of times with, with add on guys or add on girls, we have to say hey, you know, you do that once in a while with the airplane. But we don't want to do that in helicopter. This also involves go arounds as well. And I'm going to give you the scenario of what I did and what I did wrong with a student. This did involve almost an accident, we'll call it an incident. Wasn't something that I really had to report because there wasn't any damage, there was no failure. So I'm training a student and fixed wing guy and we're getting to solo. Here's my first mistake. Early in my career I was big on go arounds. Go arounds, go arounds. For whatever reason throughout time I start getting a little more relaxed about teaching go arounds. Why did that happen? I don't know. So I'm training this gentleman and he got in this bad habit of, let's say this right here is the numbers 2 8. This is now why when if you're training with me and I say I want you to land on 28 and if partway in you go, well, I'm not going to quite make 2 8. I'm going to go ahead and go to the taxiway. I'm going to go, no, go around. All right, so with this gentleman, here's my first mistake. He was struggling with the approaches and if I want him to go to two eight here he, he would do exactly what I just said, maybe he was too steep and he'd go, well I'm going to go up to that next taxiway light. And I should have never let that get started because I said, okay. So then throughout his training, he wasn't going to quite make the spot, so he kept wanting to just change the landing location. Well, what's that mean? Means he's screwing up the approach and he's changing his landing spot. That's never going to be a good idea. Go around, go around, set it up. If you watch any of our videos, you know I breach it every single time I'm out. Good setup, good setup, good setup. There's my mistake. One, I got laxed on go arounds and I let this guy start doing that. So we get him to solo, and we're going to use the same scenario. Here's 2. 8. I want him to land this way and. And I go out with him and do the normal. Hey, we're getting you warmed up. I'm going to go around with you a few times. I'm going to make sure you're having a good day. And we had done some hover solos, but first time, he's really going to go around the pattern. I go out with him and I'm like, hey, here's what I want you to do. Exactly what we just did. Take off to the east, right hand pattern, come back and land. And I want you to do normal takeoff, normal landing, and come back. Normal takeoff, normal landing, come back. That's all I want you to do. If it's going well and you're having a good day, which it looks like you are, that's all I want you to do. When you're done, come in and shut it down. So he goes out, I get out of the aircraft, he goes to do a solo. Mistake number two, supervision and surveillance. I went inside the hangar. I should have stayed in the lobby where I could observe him out the window and be. And knowing firsthand exactly what he's doing for whatever reason. I go up to my office now, the office where I'm at. I should. I know I'll see his landings, right? So I thought, well, I. At least I'll know when he comes in. I'll see him landing. I can keep tabs on him. I can, you know, hear the radio. It'll be okay. I go upstairs to my office and I see him come in for one or two approaches, and it looks pretty good going by the window, nice and slow. So I'm like, okay. And then all of a sudden, I hear him for a little bit and I start thinking, where's my student? Where did he go? And I'm thinking about it, and I'm doing whatever I'M working on upstairs. And then I know it's like, he should have been back coming in for landing right about now. And pretty soon I hear it, and I hear it, and I'm going. I'm just thinking to myself, where the hell is he? All of a sudden, as I peer out the window, because of the way the building's set up, I can see just the end of the Runway. So I know he should be going through my field of vision. I hear it getting closer, getting closer, getting closer. And then. And then I see him appear. He's going this direction. He's up here at like 100ft. And when he comes into view, I'm like, ah, what are you doing? I'm like, fly away. I'm immediately thinking, fly away. I hope you're not. Landing gets super slow. He's up here at 100ft. Here's 2 8. Here's the end of the Runway. Now he's over the grass. And I get up on my chair and I'm like, go around, Go around. Keep going. And he comes, like, almost to a stop 100ft above the ground. I'm going. And I get up out of the chair, and I'm looking out this great big glass window, and I'm like, go, fly, go. And there's room. There's some grass area and then some power lines, a car dealership. He's going to have obstacles. I'm like, don't do it. You know, this is downwind. You're slow, you're high. And then all of a sudden, I start seeing it doing this, and my heart starts to sink. And I'm up there going, don't. You know? No, no. And I watch this happen as he comes down. Faster, faster, faster. I'm thinking, okay, again, my career's over. This guy's going to kill himself. He just landed fricking downwind. He comes down and he slams into the ground and then picks back up and does this aircraft starts doing this. And I. And I, like, just put my hands up and I'm thinking, oh, my God. You know, I'm actually screaming, thinking, it's over, right? This guy's going to kill himself. Aircraft's crashed. My business is going to be dead. And I just look away, you know, and I'm yelling, screaming, going, oh, my God. And then I hear it running, and I stop and I go. When I get the guts to look, here he is coming across the grass, coming back to the ramp. And I'm like, I didn't. I didn't even I couldn't even. I was happy he's coming in, but I'm thinking, I can't believe that he even got that under control. The aircraft's got to have a busted airframe. Something bad just happened. And I rushed down the stairs, go outside. He's sitting in the middle of the ramp. And this guy was ex military, friend of mine, Good dude. He was a deputy, one of those, you know, tough, tough guys. And when I get outside, he's on the ramp, and his hands are in his lap. Blazer spinning, engines running. His hands are in his lap. His headsets are on the. On the floor. My headsets are on the floor. He hit so hard that his headsets came off. Mine came off. They were on the ground or on the bottom of the helicopter. So I. I go out. I don't even. I'm still. I can't even believe what's going on. I climb in. He's got his hands in his face, you know, in his hands. And so I'm like, okay, I'm using a dolly at the time, and we have to. Then we dolly back to the hangar. And I'm thinking, do I even pick this thing up? I'm positive the aircraft is damaged. And I thought, well, I'll pick it up, put some pressure on, or lift the collective and see if it starts shaking, acting weird, and pick it up to hover and see what it's doing, and if it feels okay, maybe I'll put on the dolly. So I pick it up, feels fine. I put it on the dolly. He can't hardly speak. I put it away. He go. I tell him to go inside and sit down and relax a minute. He goes inside. I put the helicopter in a hangar, and I go in, and he's just distraught, and he's like, well, you know, I'll refinance my house or whatever I got to do to, you know, fix your helicopter, as I'm sure I broke it. And I didn't. At the time. I didn't even want to look, or I didn't even want to open panels or anything. And we sat and talked about it, and I'm like, you know, man, why. Why did you. Why did you veer from what I told you to do? Well, at that time, they had parachutes or parachuters, and they were doing something that made him feel uncomfortable, so he felt it best to reverse his pattern, land this way. Well, it wasn't a high wind, but it was when it was. This was when he decided to reverse course. That was a downwind landing. And so when he came into my view that high, that slow, he's in the high velocity diagram. That's a no, no, this is bad news. He should have just flew away, but he panics, he starts, he thinks he's going to descend, but he gets in a swing of power and what does he do? He admitted it, he pulled, he pulled the collective. He starts to sink, he pulls collective. That's what made him accelerate even faster until he slammed and hit the ground. I don't know how this is even possible, but we went out into the field and looked. Rotor blade even hit the freaking dirt. That's how, that's how whacked out he was. And somehow pulls it together, gets it in and sets it down. We never flew it again again together after that. I was open to it. But he was, you know, pretty devastated over what happened and I'm pretty sure it scared, you know, the living daylights out of him. And it scared me too. So here's, here's the lesson go arounds. This is why now every single time I fly with somebody and if we're going to do, you know, you're going to be here for a week and we're going to do three or four flights a day, we're going to do one hour flights and every single one of those one hour flights is going to include one go around. I'm going to make you do it every time. If that approach is not set up correctly, were going around, he should have never, he should have never turned around, landed downwind, but I should have never let him get out of the habit of that's too late. That's where I want you to land if you can't make it. No, we go around and I do that to this day. You know, this has been 12, 13 years ago and now if you fly with me and that approach is not good, I make you go around. And if you go, well, I'm going to just go to the next taxiway. People do that to me. Nope. 2 8. If you can't make 28 go around, bottom line, here's one where I was at fault for not pushing go arounds hard enough. I was at fault for not sticking to my guns of a clear place to land. Not, you know, teaching him correctly and making sure that those approaches were where they should be going around if they're not not picking a different spot because you screwed up the approach. So there you go, selling a power vortex ring state, whatever you want to, whatever you want to call it. That's a real life event that happened to me in the end when I finally had the guts to go look at the aircraft, it was fine. There was no cracks, there was no dents, there was no dings. I had the mechanic check it out. Aircraft was fine. A testament to how well that aircraft is built and what a heavy hit hit that it could take. I couldn't believe the rotor blaze didn't come down and slam the tail boom or, you know, a frame cracked or something being damaged. It hit that hard and it didn't. So bottom line, downwind approaches, don't do it. Clear, clearly defined spot to land if you can't make it go around. Last note is people are too macho to go around a lot of the time. And I've seen it in the last year of the nine ratings we did here this summer, people hesitant to go around. I'm like, just go around. It's a maneuver. And if you do on the check ride, our examiner goes, oh, you set that. You didn't set it up quite right and you went around. Good call. That maneuver is done. Now go back and set it up correctly the next time. We can't go around all afternoon. But even on a testing, if you go around, it's not an immediate failure. It's a good decision that you decided wasn't right. I'm going to go around, set it up again. So we're going to go, but I'm going to pimp this real quick. The new HOGS flight bag. Check that stuff out. This is really cool. It's got a insulated part here for your water. Water bottle. Your water bottle. Your water bottle. Wada place to slip your laptop inside. Another little, another little deal in here. That's a small package for putting documents. It has the HOGS logo on it. We put together some special packages and in these special packages we ship you a bunch of goodies inside. So they're not currently on the website because our sale just ended, but we're gonna make those packages available by contacting customer service and let you know how to get one of these cool, cool tools. So come back tomorrow because I don't know what's next. We'll decide in the morning. Peace out. See you tomorrow. 14 minutes. See, that's still too long.