The DANGER of doors off Helicopter Flights!

Hey, I want to do a response to an email I got from another helicopter operator about a video that we did yesterday. And it's about taking doors off on the Robinson helicopter. And you could take this really with any helicopter. But yesterday, for the first time, we took our both doors off to go for a flight. Went over to land at a friend's house. Actually a guy who helped me start Hogs many years ago. His stepson wanted to go for a flight yesterday, and he goes, hey, we can go to my dad's, Terry's. And I'm like, let's do that. Terry's been waiting for us to land for a long time. So I briefed Jack before we went the first time I'd taken the doors off. Oh, yeah. And I wanted to point out, too, we found a good place for our doors. When you take doors off helicopter, you want to be careful, of course, because these doors are expensive. What. No matter what helicopter it is. So for us, we thought, for now, short term, we just use one of our scaffoldings that we roll around and use for different things. I roll it over here out of the way. Nobody should be down here, and they should be just fine. I'm going to build some kind of actual holder for them. But find a good place for your doors when you take them off to protect them because one gets knocked over and there's thousands of dollars of damage because somebody kicked a door. So back to the subject. I briefed Jack yesterday before we left. I said, okay, as long as you're cool with me taking the doors off. Do you have anything in your pockets? He was wearing shorts and a T shirt. And he was like, all I got is this. Here, I'll take it out. So whatever he had in his pocket, he removed and left it to hangar, so there was no danger of him having anything fly out. And I keep the aircraft nice and clean inside. I don't leave water bottles. I don't leave trash. I make sure I always make people, when you get out, latch your seatbelt back in. I'm big on keeping the aircraft really clean, so I already knew there was nothing in there. But not only did I tech or test Jack, I also check the aircraft. Everything's latched. Seat belts are latched. There's no debris laying around. And we've spent a bunch of time setting up our cameras and getting our cameras, those cameras nice and secure, securing my cables for the camera. So I'm confident nothing's going to fly out. And again, I appreciate this other operator saying, hey, Kenny, you know, it was a personal email. He goes, I saw your video yesterday and I just hope you think about this, you know. And I'm like, yes, of course. I've been to the Robinson Factory Safety School and I've studied all the Robinson safety tips and notices. I'm a firm believer. And that's really, really good stuff that applies to basically any aircraft. So the idea is if you're going to take a door off, you only want to take one door off. And sometimes we do that where maybe you want a little extra air, but you don't want the wind blowing all the way through. Take off the pilot side door and leave the passenger. Not passenger, passenger door on. I'm gonna wait just a minute for that tractor. Okay, A little break there for the mowing guy to get by. So what I'm saying was if you're gonna take off, just one take off the right hand side. Because the idea is if anything flies out of the aircraft, it can go into the tail rotor and of course cause a for real failure. And there was a specific accident, I remember reading where a CFI had a knee board that went out the window from this side, destroyed the tail rotor, and they had an actual emergency and there was a fatality. Again, I thank this operator for pointing that out. But yes, I'm well versed in those accidents. I understand. But we took the time to make sure my passenger had nothing that was going to fly out. And I made sure that the inside of the aircraft was clean and there was absolutely no nothing to fly out. So you can imagine, of course, the speed of this tail rotor spinning object goes into it. You can figure out what happens. So that is a great topic. I'm glad that guy reached out and mentioned that to me. Something you have to think about. Yes, you can legally take them doors off and there are some limitations for speeds and different things. But if you're going to take off a door, just one take off this side. If you're going to take them both off or all four off in the R44 case, just make sure everything's secure, especially knee boards, anything that can go out the window. And I want to mention we are doing flight training in the R44. Excited to announce just this morning I was texting with our examiner. We have a FAC customer, Hogs Pro member coming up. His check rides May 25th. We have another Hogs member Pro member coming August 25th. So two check rides f FAC final approach course. That's where you've got everything pretty Much kind of put together but you're down to the end and you can't line up examiner, instructor, sign offs and aircraft. And for whatever reason this seems to be a real problem in different places around the country. We have an examiner we've been using for 22 years that's available to give check rides in the Robinson. So we're excited to have two of them ready to go or two, two gentlemen take it up two spots. So we have an FAC available for June and an FAC available for July as we did last year. I'm going to be careful not to overbook because these gentlemen. One guy is going to be. He's. Everything's done. He just needs to take the check ride. So I got to give him his three hours. So he'll be here a couple days. The gentleman August is a full week. He's coming for seven days because we're going to run through absolutely everything going to do zooms with him before he arrives just like the other gentleman. I'll do zooms with both of them to make sure paperwork's ready. Look for any problems in the ground knowledge, that kind of thing. Reach out to Heather at 574-767-1797 Hogs Member Concierge. She can answer all your questions or you can just visit helicopterground.com as well. So keep coming back. We're going to keep doing more videos. We're having a blast with R44. Lots more to come. So subscribe, click like, you know, hit the bell and all that good stuff. We'll see you next video. Peace out. I like it. Okay, I'm ready. No, you're not. Hands out of your pocket. God damn it. You got your vape in there? No. Whenever you were, we were recording. Yep. All right, Do what you need longer arms. Well, if I didn't have a double chin, I wouldn't be as worried about it. Am I too dark or am I okay? I was worrying about that when we came around the corner. I'm like, am I too dark now versus chop? I mean we could have done that with the last one. Yeah, I could have threw a new beginning on it. Yeah. And we were done because I liked it.