“What are the advantages & disadvantages starting my flight career at 39?”

Live, unfortunately, but newly subscribed member for private pilot. Absolutely addicted. Anyway, here's a question I'd love some feedback on. What advantages and disadvantages will I have starting my flight career at 39 years old? I'm a business owner and so I'm just looking for something that will help subsidize the cost of flying so I can get my itch scratched without it breaking the bank. So we'll answer that right now. Real quick. This is left over from last week. Our last live was New Year's eve. We did 14 days in a row, took yesterday off and today people are calling and emailing, hey, what time are you going live today? So people really enjoyed the last 14 days. So I guess we got to do some more today. We had to kind of catch up, you know, from the new year and do a lot of paperwork and stuff and everybody's gone. So I thought, I'll answer this question that was lingering from the last set of lives. So he asked about what advantages and disadvantages. I say go for it. I mean, some people are going to tell you at 39, you're too old. I didn't start flying until I was 32, taking lessons. I didn't get my CFI until I was 36. So I've still been able to do it as a career. I do it now. I make my living with helicopters. So I don't think you're too old. So advantages. One advantage would be know you're a little bit older and nothing against a younger instructor, but there are companies who would rather hire somebody that's a little bit older. So I think there are areas where being older can actually be an advantage to you. Disadvantages. I don't really see any big disadvantage. If you, if this is in your, you said you have the itch and if you really want to do it, what could be the disadvantage? The disadvantage would be money, right? And oils. Oils always comes back to money, right. It's expensive career and you're going to spend. If you're going to go all the way to CFI and start building your time, you're going to build, you're going to spend somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000. So disadvantage would be where, for this one individual, where are you set in life? Do you have the money to do it? Is it going to cause you financial hardship? Um, I was a business owner as well. I was doing a heavy duty towing service at the time when I started taking lessons and I had previous experience as a law enforcement. Law enforcement officer. I Was actually full time and went to part time to run my towing business. And on one hand I could use a little bit of money from the business sometimes to do flight training. But you know, so starting in my late 30s, it was tough, right? Like there I had a financial few years there or more where after paying for all that training and then you get the job and you start working normally, you're going to be at low pay and that's just the way it is. So I think if it's in your heart, you should go for it and at minimum, go do the private. Focus on the private first because at minimum you get to experience flight, you get the private, you can go have fun, take up your friends, take up your family, fly to cool places, go, fly to have lunch, go see all kinds of great sites. So I think he should absolutely go for it. Let's see, I'm willing just to learn and fly my own from home and small travel across my state and it's gone already. Didn't quite get finished. This is the problem of doing these by myself. It's hard for me to read a question in time to get back to it. So I think for this gentleman, he should actually, he should just go for it, right? Go focus on the private. Get, get it and get started. That's. That's what I say. You know, anything in life, anything worth anything, isn't easy whether you're young, you're old. We have been pretty excited about the fact the last couple years specifically. We have a lot of people in their 60s and 70s getting their helicopter ratings. And a lot of people tell us that after Covid, right, Covid happened and scared a lot of people and the world changed. And we know that the world is different now than what we were before COVID And a lot of people just said, you know, after having something like that happen, it just made me decide I want to go for my dreams. So I am a dreamer myself. I always want to believe that people can do something at any age. And so again, I'm one of those that will always be a cheerleader, you know, or push you forward and in the background go, hell yeah, do it right. And don't listen to anybody because here's the other thing. And we were just discussing this New Year's Eve, had a friend over and my daughter and her boyfriend were there and we were playing games, having a good time. And we got on the topic of I was told everything that I ever wanted to do, I was told I couldn't do it, you know, My buddies laughed at me when I was young because I wanted to be a cop. And I was kind of a, you know, beer drinker, hellraiser, you know, got a little trouble here and there. And my friends would laugh at me. You know, I even had long hair. And they're like, ah, you'll never do it. It'll never happen. Well, I did it. And after I became a cop, I wanted to get into tow trucks, wreckers, you know, I was interested in it and they're like, oh, you can't do it. There's too many reasons why. Well, I did it. And I did that for 10 years and had one of the largest semi wreckers in the northern part of Indiana for a while. And I did that for 10 years, kind of while I was still doing the police thing. And then I started flying helicopters. And I was flat out told one night, this dude, and I'd like to run into this dude again because I haven't seen him in many years. He's like, oh, that's fine, you're taking helicopter lessons, but you'll never, you'll never be an EMS pilot. And I'm like, oh, really? He's like, yeah, you know, you're in your 30s or whatever, you'll never get the time. Tell me how I would never be an EMS pilot. Well, I did that for five years when I got into doing the helicopter land ground school thing. There's this dude out there has one of the most popular helicopter websites in the world. And I was referred to talk to him about, about this, and the guy's like, well, you know, Kenny, this has been tried before. A friend of mine, you know, spent a million dollars building an online ground school, and then he charged like 500 for membership. And even with my help, he couldn't do it. So read the writing on the wall, like, oh, you can't do it, right? 14 years later, you, you know, full blown, full blown helicopter line, ground school, you know, proof, RAFA wings credit. We're operating two aircraft. Each year we have more and more members sign up. We've had the best year. 2024 was our best year yet. So even with the economy and things that's happened over the last four years, we've continued to build the business every single year. We have not backtracked. We just. Each year we just keep working hard at it, taking care of our customers, being good to people, treating them the way they want to be. They would want to. We treat them the way we'd want to be treated, right? Because we Understand the problems in the helicopter training world. God knows I've had all the struggles and made all the mistakes and I've seen a lot of the bad that goes on out there. So we do our best to make a good experience, help people get through. And the last part of his question, so I can get my itch scratched without it breaking the bank. That's a toughie, right? Like again, because of the nature of these aircraft, they're just super expensive. And when you go shopping, I understand why somebody wants to get the best price possible. But the best price possible isn't always going to be the best route. You could go to the El Cheapo place and they may drag your rating out to 160 or 180 hours, where if you went to the next place who maybe has a higher rate per hour, they charge more for the aircraft, they charge more for instructor time. But if they get you done in say the national average of around 65 or 70, the guys, the guy that's higher price is going to save you money in the long run. So I understand trying to save money. And everybody wants to save money, but you can't look at just the money because the people that aren't charging very much, they could be great and very reputable or not. They might have shady maintenance, you just don't know. So I understand trying to save money. Some of the best ways to save money is you're going to go in this gentleman, you're going to go the private pilot or the professional pilot route in between private and commercial, get your instrument rating because you're going to need that in the professional career, most likely later anyway. So while you're building all that time for commercial, you get your private. Then when you're flying, you're getting pilot in command time. And to get your commercial, you have to have a set amount of pilot and combine time. So, and you got to get a bunch of that. So you might as well do the instrument rating. It's making you become a better pilot. You're logging PIC while you're getting training. So yes, you have some extra expense for an instructor, but you need those hours anyway. So one way to save money, do your instrument in between private and commercial. Big way to save money. And then another one, we can save you money on ground school by becoming a HOGS member. And that's not just a sales pitch. Sit down and do the math. And let's just say an instructor is going to charge you $65 an hour. And if you figure the time that you're going to need ground school for private commercial instruments CFI over time. If a person sits there and hand feeds you and charges you $65 an hour, you could be up near 8 or $10,000 in ground school over time of all that ground you would need. By using something like hogs, you can be studying on your own, learning on your own. So when you go in to see your instructor, they say, hey, we need to teach you about such and such. And you go, oh, selling the power. Oh, let me tell you about that. Or vortex ring state. If you go in with the knowledge, then they have to spend less time with you on the ground and in turn you spend less money. So I appreciate those of you that are reaching out today, going, hey, what time you guys are going live? We're gonna figure out to do figure out what we want to do with the schedule for doing some more live stuff. We really enjoyed the last two weeks. We used to do a ton of live. We got away from it for a while just with the busyness of the helicopters and we've cranked this up the last second part of December. We really had fun. We really had enjoyed doing it and we had a lot of people every day coming in asking questions. So we promise to do some more lives. So do us a favor, subscribe to the channel and click the notification bell. That way you'll know when we go live. And we also send out emails of when we're going to go live and what the topics are going to be. So subscribe to the channel, do us a favor, click the notification bell. And that's a favor to me. Just for all the free content that we put out and answer people's questions. And helping you doesn't cost you anything to subscribe and click the notification bell. We asked that as a favor. I've been saying we around 47 or 48,000 subscribers, but we're just about to hit 46,000 and my goal is to hit 50,000 subscribers. I keep saying it doesn't mean anything. I don't get a button, I don't get money. It does nothing other than it's just a cool personal goal that I've looked forward to getting to since I started my YouTube in 2010. So 15 years I've been doing this and it's taken 15 years to get to 46,000. So just looking forward to that, to that 50,000 subscriber. Just a personal thing. That's it. So do me a favor and do that and as soon as I'm done here. I'll make sure I put some link down links down below for our memberships we got free PDFs, all kinds of free stuff you can consume to help get you started. So especially those for the beginners. We have a free PDF called Private Pilot 101, a helicopter training blueprint. I'll make sure that's down there below as soon as I get done and I click end. That's a great free resource and that you can download it immediately after giving up your email. You can immediately download that book and it answers top frequently asked questions and all kinds of tips and things in there to help you get through the ratings and save money which was the basis of the the question here. So I'm going to make sure we respond to this. B Bry looks like Bryce Dodge 8259. Anyway, let's see who that was for. So hopefully he made it in or he'll catch this later. I'll make sure I'll send him a link. So thanks for stopping by. Subscribe and stay tuned for whatever we dream up next because we're going to be doing some more fun stuff. All right, see you next video. Peace out.