Take a tour of Helicopter Online Ground School

Sam.

Well, I'm Kenny Keller, the creator of Helicopter Online. Ground school Saturday. Got my man Steve here running the camera. We want to do something cool and different. We do a lot of, obviously, videos. We do a lot of live stuff. And we're always up inside in the hangar or, I'm sorry, in our studio, in our offices. Who wants to always be in an office? We thought we'd show you around today, talk about ground school, show you the aircraft, the R44 and the Enstrom, show you the facilities here at the Plymouth Municipal Airport and kind of let you see what we're all about. So we are offering flight training in the Robinson R44 helicopter and the Enstrom F28F. You can get those details on pricing on our website, helicopterground.com just click on the tab. Flight training at the top. We do, we do require anyone coming for flight training to be a member.

Of our ground school.

And that's because over the years of teaching, people show up, they always tell me their ground's good and their flying is good, and they just want me to help them finish up. And they show up and their flying is good and their ground not so much. And we recently had Jamie Cobb from Texas up here. Jamie honestly said he'd had four years working on his private eight instructors.

And.

He just wanted to get finished. And I said, before you come up here, make sure you go through ground school. He was already a member and make sure you have your knowledge. And he showed up, and in nine days we had his rating finished up for him. And that's a true story. And the problems that for him at home, you can't nail just one. A lot of times you have trouble with instructors, aircraft, line up examiners, your things at home. He's a businessman, so, you know, he had some trouble because of just his. Everything he had going on at home. He was hard for him to get the time without employees and people bugging him. So once he was here for nine days, he could just focus every day, all day on getting the rating done. And we got it done. So we'll go ahead and start moving along. I'm going to take you and show you the lobby area and just show you around the Plymouth Municipal Airport a little bit. Over here is the lobby, so we're.

Gonna head in there now.

Airport manager's David Latimer, who was a inspiration for me as a kid. He flew helicopters for the state police.

And I was interested in being a.

Police officer and a helicopter pilot. He flew helicopters for the state police. So Growing up as a kid, I always looked up to Dave. And now years later, Dave is the airport manager here. And he has been over backwards to help me in the past five years to move my business along. City of Plymouth's been amazing too. The aviation board has done so much to help me. So here's Dave's office. This is our lobby here. It's bathroom in the lobby and the usual stuff you have at an airport. So we're gonna head upstairs, check out the conference room, go by offices, and then we'll go down, take a look at the Enstrom. So come on up for the conference room. This has been newly remodeled and nice area to do presentations. We do occasionally film down here, occasionally do ground school down here. Got a nice couch and recliner for transitioning pilots, Got a whiteboard, got a nice big map, microwave, computer for flight planning, and small refrigerator. So now we're going to head down the hallway, kind of a long hallway, but we're heading down to our studio now. I'm going to stop by my original office anyway. Gloria, go ahead and roll that video now on Jamie just so you can see what Jamie was all about coming up in his R44. And we'll make the trip on down the hallway and we'll be back in a minute.

Hey, it's Kenny with helicopter online ground school here with Jamie Cobb. One of our ground school members just got his private pilot rating and we just want to do a quick impromptu video because we both got to get going, have other things to do. But the checkride was yesterday. He just got done and we just want to talk a little bit about, you know, we all have struggles when we go to get our rating, private commercial, whatever the case is. I failed my first private, so my private turned into a couple years, you know, more money, lots of frustration. Jamie's had some issues along the way just with.

And I'll let him tell you more about it, but just kind of getting.

People lined up because a lot of times having an available instructor who has examiner available, you know, everybody's time, everybody's busy with their lives, so it's not always easy to get these ratings done.

So real quick, Jamie, just, just give us the brief overview of just a little bit of struggle that you had.

And why you decided just to come up here and just get it done.

Well, everybody's busy. We, you know, we all have things to do and trying to get our schedules lined up. Yep, it's pretty difficult. So I bought your online ground school and felt I needed to get More of a grip on things. And I did that and just going through it, and I thought, well, maybe Kenny can help me out trying to get this thing, get this thing done. I was getting tired of it and just tired of all the struggles.

He's been at ground school for about a year, and I even went back and looked through the emails. We've been communicating for a year. There's 10 or 15 emails, and several times he's called me through the way and saying, hey, you know, I'm just kind of struggling with this or that, and I give him some pointers. And we talked a couple times about him coming up here, and he'd just been working out long enough where he just said, you know, what if I come up there? Can I just come up and get done?

And he did.

And he got here on the 2nd. Yesterday was the 10th. We got him done in about nine days. He had good knowledge from going through ground school.

The instructors he flew with did a.

Good job with him in the aircraft. So when he showed up, there wasn't really a big problem other than it was just putting everything together, going out, flying a little bit, doing a little bit of ground to polish everything up to make sure it was all good, and then going through the paperwork, because we know, or if you don't know, there's a lot of documentation and logbooks and 8710 and getting everything right to go see the examiner. So we did that in about nine days and flew over yesterday. Windier than the average checkride. But he felt good about it, examiner felt good about it, and probably the windiest checkride I've done in 15 years. And he still went out and flew to a standard, passed and got the rating done.

So I'm not sure how I did that. But you did work out.

You did it.

I was even going, wow, it's kind of windy. But I thought, well, as long as examiner wants to go and you feel good about it. And then they went out and flew maneuvers and got it done. And after the fact, I said, hey, is there anything that the examiner asked.

You during the checkride that we hadn't.

Covered or wasn't in online ground school? And your answer was nope, you covered everything.

I mean, your videos really helped me out a lot. I mean, there's just. The books are overwhelming. So many doc. There's so many documents for that.

Your.

Your videos cleared up.

That's, you know, why I build it, because I failed my first checkride. Most people know.

And that's one thing that Jamie Connected.

With me when he first started watching my videos was hey, the guy admitted that he failed. And you know, I've created a business out of it because I know how hard it is when you got eight different books and you're trying to study here and you're trying to study here and it just gets overwhelming. So I kind of just put my own little training manual together with my own notebook and been teaching out of it for years and then turned it into online ground school and here we are. So.

And it works, and it works for me.

Yep.

So.

And I'm already doing the commercial now.

Yeah, he's gonna go back, build his.

Pic time and when he's ready for.

The commercial he'll come back up. And he knows now he can just come up, we'll get to it, get everything, get it done, get everything signed off, make sure the requirements are all met. Polish the fly and polish the ground school and go out and get it done. So want to learn more about our helicopter ground school? Go to helicopterground.com in the description box below. Thanks Jamie for traveling all the way.

From Texas to come up here and.

You can look for more to come. So give us a like and a share and we'll see you in the next video.

He is the finisher.

Nice camera job walking into the wall. Alright, so we're back. We're gonna stop by my old office. We just recently reacquired this. But several years ago when things were really tough, all I could afford was this one little tiny little office. And this is my first green screen. Gallon of paint from Lowes. 25 bucks for a gallon of chroma key. So all my original videos were here with this wall. Had lights on the wall, hanging everywhere. Had two desks, computers, everything jammed in this one room. So I was always like moving stuff around, trying to work, trying to record and do all this stuff alone. But hey, it was a great story and it's a good, it's a good, it was a good start. Now this is available for students. They're tired and they're here working, getting a little tired and come in here and take a nap on the ACDC blanket. So now we'll head on this way. We got another room over here for doing ground school. This area has been seen a lot recently. Did a couple videos in here with Holly when she was here for her cfi. Did some stuff with Caleb. Gary, Gary's doing his CFI right now. Did some practice teaching. He did airspace with one of our guys. Working on a private add On So we have this area for our use. Now I'm gonna take you over to the main area. My favorite part is our studio. So actually, well, I'll try to see if I can find my little flip video cameras walking through. But I started five years ago with a little tiny flip video camera borrowed or loaned to me from my buddy Nick Logan, who taught me about marketing and video and helped me even get the start with the online ground school. So this is the heart of everything. Got a computer over there. We have our own computer server here for storing all of our ground school stuff. We have multiple computers when we're doing live events operators over there. Over here we can be checking Facebook and looking for comments and, you know, do everyday work there. Over here is narrator. You probably notice we've got the walls treated in different areas for the sound, which has helped a great deal. Multiple cameras. This is where we run all of our pretty much most of our training, most of our events. Again, the main person running camera is usually right over here. And this system is so cool because we can record, we can go live, we can do both. I can pull presentation from any computer at any point during a presentation. Roll those, roll video. It's really pretty awesome. So our own private bathroom up here, which is nice. We don't have to run downstairs all the time. This room you might recognize. Gary and I did a bunch of ground school right here. This is our new green screen area. We had it in the other room. We just moved it over here. Just treated this room. I did a couple of green screen videos and I didn't like it because it was super echoey. And we just treated this wall because when you're speaking, you know, the sound bounces off the walls and bounces in the corners. So we've got the corners treated. And this screen on the wall here is tied in with everything over there. So whoever's running the camera could be doing their job. And I can see what's going on. Keep track of the presentations on the wall there. So crazy wallpaper. But hey, all that really matters is what the camera sees. Right now. We just want to give you a firsthand look. Right over here is office manager Steve, camera operator Steve, guy behind the camera. He keeps track of scheduling and keeps track of all kinds of stuff for us students and working on office paperwork and all that kind of stuff. So here is the Nstrom. Take a look down there. Enstrom just arrived last night. Gary went to Cleveland to pick it up. Gary is going to do his CFI rating in the nstrom mainly because he has more time in the instrument than he does anything else. And then after he gets the CFI done, I have Sarah Green coming from California. She'll be going to do her CFI along with maybe one other member. So probably get maybe Gary over there to do his get his R44 sign off. We're going to get Gary done first. So this is the nstrom, belongs to a good friend of mine, Dr. Nick, and it's a cream puff. It mainly for Dr. Nick's use in the summertime to have fun. We use it in the wintertime instead of it sitting all winter and doing nothing. It's here for us to use for flight training. So if you have any questions about our ground school, you can contact me@kennyelicopterground.com you want to know about our pricing or our flight training, go to helicopterground.com again click on the flight training link. The big thing again is we do require members to become a or we require people flying the aircraft to become a ground school member first. It just saves your time. Saves my time. I'm a busy guy. I love to teach. But the worst thing is when somebody shows up and they want to get a checkride and their flying is good in their ground, not so good. So Jamie was the one that said, Kenny man, if I was you, I'd implement everybody's got to go through your ground school. Because he's proof that going through the ground school can make things easier. And I was there first checkride. He did an excellent job. He was so worried and so freaked out and I was proud of him. The examiner was very happy with him. He did a great job. Went out on a pretty windy day after he passed the oral and passed the flight test with a lot of wind. So that was really cool too. So please give us a like and share on this video. Have any questions about our ground school or flight training, go to helicopterground.com email me at kennyelicopter Ground with your flight training questions. We have videos for a good majority of about anything you want to know about flight training. Either we have a video already that's that's built we can send you or we'll make you a new video. I've been doing that for the last six months. Answering questions with video. It's just easier to get the word out and answer people with a video versus me trying to type a big long answer out every time somebody has a question. So again, give us a like and share on this video and we'll see in the next video.

It's sa.