Verify Ground & Instructor Charges with your Flight School

Hey, it's Kenny with helicopter land ground school. And we want to cover something today that's really important. Verify with your helicopter flight school how they charge for instructor and or ground time or both. So I just want to give you a little insight to this. There are several different ways that flight schools may do their charges, and I'm not really saying good or bad for any of those. What I'm telling you is you want to verify with the flight school prior to how do they do these different methods of billing? Because if you get that up front, out of the way and understand how they bill, it's going to save frustration later, most likely because some are going to make it fully clear up front. Sometimes maybe not so much. Or if you don't understand how they bill, then you're frustrated later. And this comes from the other day. We did a video on cost of the private rating. And I'm going to have Heather bring that up right now and we'll show that picture and I'll put the link down below. So if you want to go back and visit this video, we do a breakdown on how much it costs to get a private rating. And I like what this company did with their layout on how the ground or how the charges work to obtain your private license. Okay. But the thing you'll notice here is it doesn't show you how much they're charging for ground time or how much they're charging for instructor time. So when you look at it, you see dual flight instruction. Okay. So that should be. That's most likely. That is for the helicopter and the instructor in this case. And somebody questioned, well, hey, why do they charge 315 when someone's soloing? And my answer was, well, a lot of times the instructor is still there watching over you, checking you before you go, checking you when you get back. So a lot of companies still charge the same rate per hour for the helicopter, regardless of whether the instructor is in there or not. And that's okay. That's customary at some places. Okay. But there's no mention here of how that works. So I'm going to give you an example, and you can go ahead and bring that one up, Heather. Like this flight school that we're showing you here, here's what they did. They told people, hey, I think at that time, whatever the case was, we were flying instruments and it was like, we'll say 350 an hour for the helicopter, whatever it was, this was a long time ago. But they didn't charge for ground time and they didn't charge for instructor time. What they told people was, oh, the ground school is a self study course. We don't really do ground here. Okay. Which sounds kind of bad, right? But what I want to show you is on this flight schedule, how they have, they schedule everybody in two hour blocks. And some of the instructors or part time instructors would even complain and say, we can't do a good lesson in two hours. And I have to agree with that. It's very difficult when you walk in with Tom at 8 and by 10 you got to be ready for Frank. Okay? But here's the thing, they just charge for the aircraft only. So customer comes in, you pay for the hours of flight time. That's it. There was no other ground charges of any kind. They didn't charge for instructor time and they really didn't do much ground school. They had a whole round of part time instructors. I was full time, they paid me salary, so I would do ground with people. When weather was bad or somebody just wanted to come in and do ground, they allowed me to do ground school. But they didn't actually charge the customer for that. Okay? That's the way one flight school operated. So there was no hidden charges there. That's how they did it. So the next example I want to give you is at the flight school, I did both my private and commercial. When you would go in, instructor meets you, you shake hands, that's when the billing starts for the instructor time. Okay? So the whole time he's with you talking about what you're going to do for the day, going out and pre flighting the aircraft, pushing it out, fueling it, climbing the aircraft, start it up, do your flight time, get done with the flight, put the helicopter away. He signed the logbook when they were done, let's say it was two hours or 2.5 hours. You got billed for 2.5 hours instructor time. And there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. It does consider, you know, it turns into a good chunk of money, but the instructor needs to be paid and the flight school is charging you so much per hour, they're keeping part of that and they're giving part of that to the instructor. And that can work in a. That's up to every individual flight school, how that happens. But if you don't understand that in the beginning and someone just throws out, oh, well, you need this many hours, this is what it's going to cost you. Then all sudden later you're going, well, how come I was going to be 12 grand and I'm only halfway done and I've spent eight. If you didn't understand how they were going to do that billing, then you start, you know, your account goes low and you're like, well, I thought I was going to have this many hours along with that. So the point of the video is to just verify with your flight school up front. How do I get billed for flight time? I'm in the aircraft, how do I get billed for the ground time? When the instructor is working one on one with me, it can be a number of different ways. And flight schools are going to set it up, whatever works for them. So I gave you two ideas on how it may happen. Okay, so if you talk to them up front and you understand how they doing it, how they're going to do it, you can budget correctly. A lot of times people have a problem. We know like, well, I don't want to pay for that, you know, hour and a half of ground time. Well, that instructor's there trying to earn a living, right? So if he's not making any money, that's no good for him. It's already a low paying job the way it is. So again, flight schools, I always stick up for flight schools. In general, running a flight school is not usually a big, huge moneymaker. You're trying to make enough money to pay your instructors, pay the insurance on your helicopter, pay the maintenance on your helicopter. That's outrageous. You know, hangar fees, advertising, websites, all the things that you have to have to go along with a business. They're not usually a big, huge money making opportunity. So just understand that flight schools are going to have their own way for setting up the billing. And if you ask that question up front and you understand exactly how it works and then you can plan accordingly and you won't be frustrated with your flight school later because you can choose to. Yes, this is the school I want. I accept those charges. I think that's fair. If not, then it's your option to go somewhere else. But just get that out up front and you'll be a lot better off. So what we're going to go to next is if you can bring up the code. Heather, down below, there should be links for our holiday sell. It's a Labor Day sell. Labor Day is over, but we're going through September 15th. So I'll check the video when I get done and make sure the links are down below. For a 50% discount off of all of our memberships, there's a 50% discount. Nice job. I see that roll up there. American 50, that's the code. In the event you go to our website, you didn't use the links below, type American50 any of the checkout pages. When you type in American50, that's going to show you a 50% discount. So one way that we can save you money at your flight school is by using helicopter land, ground school, for example, private pilots only $49 a month. Right now, with the American 50, you can take 50% off of that. So that's what, 24, 50 for the first month, which is over 20 hours of video, over 120 or over 120 videos with over 20 hours of training that you can watch over and over again. After that first month, it goes on to the normal $49 a month. And you can cancel any time you can take a test flight. With all those monthly options, we have private pilot, commercial pilot, cfi, instrument pilot, flight review, rusty pilot, and helicopter add on. So all Those have a 50% off the monthly membership and then the big professional pilot package right now. Do we have. We got one left? Is this all the one we got left? Yep. Okay, Heather's got the first load. Has all been shipped with the exception of. With the exception of this hat right here on the table. I just put an order in over the weekend because the professional pilot is selling like hotcakes. It went faster than we expected. So I have another order of hats in. This is a really, really, really nice hat. They're all shipped so far. This is what we send you for signing up for the professional pilot membership. Once you sign up, Heather will email you, welcome you to the site. Well, she welcomes everyone. She'll send you a welcome email, make sure you got logged in. Okay. Make sure you understand how the site works. See if you need anything. She will offer you your phone consultation with Brian Rutledge, our operations manager. Brian talked to four professional pilot members today, just today before we went live. And he said all four professional pilot members were extremely happy to get that phone consultation with him, where he just gets on with you on the phone and finds out where you're at in your training. Are you having any struggles? You know, what can we help you with? Any questions about the site and how the site can help you with ground school? So, you know, kind of back to the ground school point, if you think about it. Depending on what a flight school's charging you, if you're doing, let's say you're doing one on one ground and they're charging you 50 bucks an hour. Okay, totally fair. That's a very fair price right now in the industry. 50 bucks an hour is not uncommon. Some people charge more, some people charge less. All depends on how that flight school has their charges set up. So each time you're sitting down, you're doing one on one with your instructor, you're paying $50 an hour. And again, that's fair. But if you think about it, you can join a monthly membership, for example, the private pilot, you can still do one on one with your instructor, but you can limit that time to and cut that down by learning on your own. And instructors are normally pretty happy when you walk in and your knowledge is in good shape and they go, wow, what have you been doing? Oh, I've been using the helicopter land ground school. Usually they're like, well, great, you know, your knowledge is really good. We gotta touch up this and touch up that. But they can start evaluating your knowledge and see where you might be weak. So you can use helicopter land ground school as a supplement to whatever kind of ground that you're doing. But if you think about that, if you're paying say 50 bucks an hour and you do 30, 40 hours of one on one ground at 50 bucks an hour, what if you cut that in half to 20 hours or even cut it down to 10 hours because you're using helicopter on ground school to hone your knowledge at home or, you know, wherever you are from any device, phone, desktop, laptop, whatever you're using, you can significantly lower that cost to the ground school by using us. So anything I need to answer under Heather before we go, we're wrap this up pretty quick. Just nice comments. Okay, so again, I'll put after we're done, I'll make sure the links are down below so you can go directly to that link and it'll take you direct to the page that shows you that discount. You'll see it, it'll say, it'll show you what the discounted price is. So any of the monthly membership, it's for the first month and then after that it goes back to the normal price and again you can keep as long as you like. You can cancel any time, just use it for a few weeks and if you're brushed up and that's all you need, you simply unsubscribe and that's it. It's that easy. Then the big professional pilot package, throw it out there again. It's hot right now and people are jumping on it. And I'll even mention we have a lot of members who maybe were on maybe a private pilot Plan for two, three months or one, the other plan for a few months. We've had quite a few current members that have just switched. They've canceled their monthly and jumped on the professional pilot course because they've used it, they know they like it, they want to keep it. And so they're like, wow, 50% off that professional pilot. I think I better jump on it now. Because this is only the second time in nine years that we've offered 50% off. First time we did it was for our March celebration. Eight years online and due to what we've all been through this year. Been a rough year around the world, right? We thought, you know what? For the labor day sale through September 15, let's do it upright again and let's offer 50% off just to get people out there flying again, get you back in the swing of doing your ground school. You can get back out there and pursue your rating that maybe you were working on and then you had to quit flying for a little while. Either just do your own health or your flight school was shut down or whatever the case. You know, things are slowly getting better and people are getting out there. They're getting their ratings. As we can prove, people are still sending their pictures in and we're adding you all to the Hogs Wall of fame. And the other thing that we do offer, send us your picture after you pass your checkride and we send you no go button. Helicopterground.com got a few left over there. We'll see if we're going to replenish those after we get back. We're asking people to send in your pictures of your no go buttons. Been a while since we got one. And also professional pilot members. Send us a picture of your hat when you get it. Put that dude on. Send us a picture. We'll post it just to show the new hat. We're really proud of it. We got more coming, so do us a favor. Subscribe to the channel. Click the bell so you'll be notified of any other videos that we do between now and the 15th. And then or thereafter, we'll be running some more specials. We'll be doing some more giveaways. Have some more fun before the 15th. So you got until the 15th to save, subscribe, click the bell and we see you in the next video. Peace out.