In this video Kenny Keller of Helicopter All‑In Ground School explains why designated pilot examiners (DPEs) appear to be “booked out.” He argues that the primary cause is a high rate of first‑attempt checkride failures, which forces examiners to spend more time retesting students. Kenny provides updates on his Final Approach Course (FACS) schedule, noting a surge in courses from nine in 2023 to 14 in 2024 and a projected 12 courses by the end of April 2026. He announces that the school is now operating exclusively with R44 helicopters, having retired the R22 due to downtime. Kenny introduces a limited‑time ProPilot lifetime membership that includes six one‑hour Zoom coaching sessions covering any pilot training need. He highlights the roles of his team members—Heather, Lindsay, Houser, and Taz—in supporting the upcoming checkrides and training. The video also promotes the channel’s upcoming 14‑year online anniversary on March 1 and a push to reach 50,000 YouTube subscribers, urging viewers to subscribe. Throughout, Kenny emphasizes preparation, his 25‑year experience, and the importance of efficient scheduling and instructor support.
Chapters
Well, there would be more examiners available if there weren't so many people failing checkrides on the first attempt. I titled this for this video. That's the title. I recently watched an examiner or two examiners online and they were talking about, seriously, they were saying we would have more examiners available available if there weren't so many people failing check time, check rides first time around. And I know that I can't. I believe they were fixed wing examiners. But I can tell you from the helicopter side of things, that's a fact. There's a lot of people fell in checkrides. And as you know, well, you may not know, I'm Kenny with helicopter all in ground school and we do this thing called final approach course. So people have been using our ground school, get their knowledge ready. I do some zooms with them and we have already for this year, 2014 or 2026. We've already got two for the end of February next week. That's what I just went out to fly to kind of just brush up the helicopter, brush up my skills a little bit, make sure everything was charged. We're doing two the end of February to the beginning of March, two the end of March and two mid April. As you can see, it's getting our schedule kind of clogged up. And this is our nice new board that we use for the CFIs because we're doing a lot of CFIs, a lot of people come in here for CFI. So today Lindsay said, well, hey, what was that big ass calendar you were talking about? And I go, yeah. She goes, you want me jump online and buy one? So I don't know. I kept seeing big ass calendars advertised on the Internet. So let's see what we got here just so we can free that board back up since we're getting so busy. How's that dude look? Oh, no, it's by the month. I thought she was ordering us by the year. Oh, well, that's still good. This will be nice because now we can have this set aside separately. I'll probably get another one of those stands. Those stands are freaking cool. But this way we can lay the month out. And yeah, we use an online calendar, but it's nice to when we're all sitting around talking about checkrides and doing scheduling together. It's me, Heather, Lindsay, we're all working together. It's nice just to have it out where we can see it. We don't have to keep going to the computer every time when we're locked we're talking about when we can schedule people. So I just kind of wanted to update you on all that and let you know that. Yeah, we did nine checkrides in 2023. Nine checkrides, 2024. Last year, 2025, we did 14 FACS Final Approach courses and now we're going to have 12 done if everything goes good. We're going to have 12 done by the end of April and we had 14 the whole last year. So our final approach courses are picking up. And just so you know, we are running just R44 now. The R22 we had was just too much downtime, too many issues. So we're just doing all R44. And that's funny. We decide to end the R22 for now and the R44 explodes. So I'd rather have it that way. Anyway, 12 checkres by end of April. That's good stuff. So coming up, March 1st is going to be our 14 year online anniversary. And we've got some different things we're cooking up to try to do some specials and we're not quite there yet, but I know next week's going to get really busy and Heather and Lindsay will be working on different things. But what we're going to throw out is a special. Anybody wants to go for pro pilot and get one on one with me. We ran the special three or four years ago. We haven't done it since. We're going to make this a limited amount of them because I can't do too many zooms. But I'm going to release this early. And this is available now for the pro pilot which is private pilot, commercial pilot, instrument pilot and cfi. Unlimited membership doesn't expire. I will do six zooms with you on whatever, whatever you want to work on, whether you're doing checkride, prep a mock checkride, just ground school, getting ready for private commercial cfi, whatever it is. I'm going to do six zooms with you. We'll make them one hour because anybody gets tired in an hour needs a break and we can break those up over a series of six weeks and can't get too bogged down with too many in one week just because it throws a wrench in the facs and everything else we got going on. So early bird special for ProPilot if you'd like ProPilot again, it's lifetime membership at this time for this special, limited time offer of course. I'm going to give you six zooms along with that pro pilot. So I'll put a link down for ProPilot below. And if you sign up because you saw this video, just send me an email. Kennyelicopterground.com Let me know that, hey, I just signed up for ProPilot and I want to take you up on that special offer of the six Zooms. I've made some good friends from the last time we did this where I offered the pro pilot along with six Zoom sessions. You know, you get to know people pretty quickly on a Zoom call and I've ended up with some good friends that have remained my good friends since we did this did these several years ago. So I just kind of want to update you on what's going on if you want to get into facs. We're going to be scheduling clear end of May at this point. So pretty exciting stuff that these facs are working out the way they are. And back to the point of the beginning of the video. It's all about preparation and we just got good at it here because I've been doing it for 25 years. That's it. And nothing against new instructors. I was a new instructor once and I know when you first get your cfi, you get your CFI and you're like going, am I seriously an instructor? Could they, did they really give me this license? So new instructors do the best job that they can do, but I've been doing it 25 years now. My right hand man, Houser, still flying corporate, but he comes down and helps me on his days off. He'll be here next week actually to help me start these first two off. Taz is going to come for a week in March to help me with some of those because not only we got all these going on, the one guy is transitioning over, gonna do a commercial add on but he's been all Jet Ranger time so he's gonna have to do 20 hours minimum in the R44. So we're gonna try to sneak that in as well. So getting busy. Stay tuned for whatever's to come Next. Start watching YouTube. We're gonna beef up the videos a little bit, try to capture more of the day to day stuff that goes on here with all these checkrides going on. So many things that we could be sharing tips and tricks because we've pretty much got it figured out right now and we just. It's 25 years of beating your head against the wall and doing these over and over and over again. Another beauty is our examiner that I've been using for 25 years. His life has changed a little bit and he's kind of narrowed. He used to do a lot of different things, including the checkrides, but now he's kind of simplified his life a little bit and has even more time available. And he's able to do. He was already doing all of our checkrides, but it just. It's opened it up a little bit to where it's a little bit easier to get him because he's still busy guy, but his life's a little bit less packed and he's even more available than he's been in the past. So a lot going on. Stay tuned. Oh, yeah. And we're getting close to 50,000 subscribers on YouTube. Do me a favor, subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet. I just want to get to 50,000. I'm not going to get anything special. I don't get a play button. Nothing happens. I get nothing at 50,000. It's just been a goal of mine for being on YouTube for almost 15 years. Oh, my gosh, 16 years. So it's taken me 16 years to get almost 50,000 subscribers. And I know there's people that have wonderful channels that get there in a couple of years. So I'm just excited about the 50,000 mark. After that, I'm not really concerned about it. Just 50,000 on YouTube sounds pretty cool. So if you haven't done that yet, just do us a favor, subscribe. Click the bell so you're notified of the next video coming out. And stay tuned because a lot of stuff's gonna be happening March 1st. Big celebration coming 14 years online. Pretty crazy how it's all turned out. So stand by for more and we'll see you next video. Peace out.
