Pilot Proficiency Starts HERE (Live Training + 50% Off)
Kenny Keller walks through a Professional Proficiency program for helicopter pilots that goes beyond FAA currency. It covers disciplined preflight, regular solo practice to keep muscle memory sharp, and strong ground knowledge. HOGS courses are 50% off for a limited time.
Chapters
All right, this says we're live. If you come in, type something in here, let us know that you are in chat. Heather is over on the computer just across from me, monitoring the chat. We're just throwing out something new and different here at the end of the year. We'll wait kind of for a few minutes since we sent an email out to like 6400 people. See anybody jumps into chat again, ask your questions. If in chat, we're going to talk about something that we just recently came up with in the last month or two that we've been wanting to talk about, but we're kind of saving it for 2026, and it's going to end up being probably a free PDF, we think maybe even a free online course that people could go in and use. And while we're waiting to see if anybody pops into chat, we've done 14 ratings this year. Probably 50 of them have been CFI. We have three lined up for January. Those are. All three of those are CFI. So I think due to the fact we've been doing so much from the instructor side of things in the last year has kind of prompted this. And I'm going to use myself for an example in this professional proficiency. We're going to talk about what I've learned in a fairly short amount of time is not a fairly short amount of time. Over time. I've been flying since 97, so approaching 30 years, teaching 28, 25, I don't know, whatever. And you know, as instructors, as we move through our careers, there's times where we fly a lot, there's times we don't fly so much. I have flown professionally in the commercial environment and I've done 135, and I've did five years of VMs. So I've been through the gamut of a lot of the different things that pilots will do in their career. Now, for 14 years we've been doing this thing called helicopter line ground school. So depending on what aircraft I had available to me at any point in time the last 14 years, maybe I've been flying a lot, or maybe I haven't been flying very much. And specifically what I've. Again, that's kind of what's brought all this on. This professional proficiency thing is realize realizing with myself, and I even went back through the logs to look at how much I was flying in the last six months. And due to the fact that we have a lease aircraft, of course, we try to do as much revenue flying with the aircraft as well. And I was in the mindset for the majority time we've had it. Well, revenue, Revenue flying is done. I don't want to spend any more time on the aircraft or spend more on fuel. Maintenance comes around quicker and well, sometimes didn't use quite all my lease hours. So in the last month or month and a half, I'm like, you know what? I myself feeling kind of rusty at times. Like the problem as a cfi. Not a problem, but just part of being a cfi. We ride around with people we're evaluating, we're watching what they're doing, we're helping them, we're critiquing them, and you can get really good at that. But because we're doing advanced training, most of the time I'm not on the controls. Most of the time I'm there in theory talking about it, watching what they're doing. And then once in a while somebody might say, well, here, take the controls and you do it well, then you got to put up or shut up, right? It's like it's easy for any of us as instructors to sit there and talk about, do this, watch that airspeed. Now, in confined areas, people are always going to get too slow and they're usually going to get too low and they're going to lose their spot. We know all the things to look out for. It's just kind of funny when we go to perform those things ourselves, we sometimes make the same mistakes. And what I've done the last month and a half was I thought, you know what, I'm gonna just start flying more on my own, specifically just going up by myself. And we do flying where I'm critiquing people, getting them ready for check rides. We do flying where we take the girls out with us and we do filming for video content. But that's even different because I'm flying, doing maneuvers, but I'm also trying to talk at the same time and think about the content of the video and what I really realized in the last month and a half, how flying more by myself and just going out and doing maneuvers, how much I've needed to do that for my own personal benefit. And I was flying most of it just in the pattern, going around and around doing maneuvers, keeping things fresh. And then recently thought, you know what? I should do a little cross country fly and go enjoy getting out of the pattern. Because I've been in the pattern for years and it's always just going out and going around and around and around and grinding out maneuvers, right? Which I. I love to do. And that's, that's the fun part about it, right? It's, I enjoy the point of going out and doing maneuvers helping critique someone kind of losing my train of thought here. So I enjoy that part of it. But because I don't go anywhere, you start kind of your skills start kind of like cross country using an iPad. I don't really use the iPad a whole lot. So in the training environment we're sitting here a lot of times I'm like, well, ask Howser about that or ask Hunter about that. Because they use the electronic stuff a lot more than I do and I haven't used it a lot. So I'm like, you know what? Put the iPad on my leg and go fly. I wouldn't. Flown some cool places. There's some reservoirs down south I go down and check out. There's a military, old military airport that we're going to do a video on soon. It's called Converse and it's in Indiana and it's an old World War II airport, I guess, if it's an octagon. But they built this back in World War II, 1800ft so they could practice landing on aircraft carrier. So no matter where the wind's at, you would have an 1800 foot strip. So it's a great big huge pad still in use today. And it does have one Runway marked on it. But it was originally built as this World War II training airport for pilots for landing on aircraft carriers. So anyway, the bottom of the story is spending the time in the very recent past going out and just flying, doing different things, going places, going, seeing some sites, going around the pattern, doing autos. I've gotten myself back to where I feel really pretty confident again, not that I wasn't confident, but I don't know, kind of a new confidence, I guess, like when I was younger and in a position where I flew lots and lots of hours, your proficiency gets to a certain level. And where I'm at now, later in my career, where I am majority of the time, I'm teaching, talking about it in theory all the time, sitting in the aircraft, critiquing someone do this, do this, do this, you just realize how much your own skills kind of start slacking. So I really been enjoying that. And you know, because we're in the ACS all the time, when you look in the acs, it doesn't matter. Any rating you're going for, you're going to see where they talk about currency versus proficiency. So we had some discussions about this amongst Us here and we're talking about it and we're going, you know, of course, currency is, are you current as far as what the regulations say? Let's say, are you current for passengers in the day, are you current for passengers at night, is your license current? Do everything current. You could be current, but not necessarily proficient. Meaning you're, you took passengers up and flew at night 49 days ago. Well, that's 49 days ago. If you're not flying much at night, night flying is a different animal. That's something else that I've realized in the past. I used to fly a lot more tonight when I was flying EMS and doing different things. But in the training environment, I wasn't getting much night flying. And especially depending on what time of the year it is, because in the summertime around here in Indiana doesn't get dark till 10 o' clock at night. So I might go a long time without getting much night. So this winter I've probably done five or six night flights by myself or somebody going along with me. Just to help refresh the night flying that, that one, I could tell you I went quite a while without not flying at night. And the first time I went on a really dark night with no moon. And you just realize how freaking dark it really gets at night and night flying against a different animal, if you're doing it and you're doing it maybe a few times a month, that's one thing. But maybe I went say six months without flying at night. And there's been a couple times that I'm like, you know, you, a person needs to do this more often than just wants to keep yourself current. So there's currency and then proficiency. So your proficiency can be, are you proficient? Right? Are you more than current? To me, proficiency means you're actually really, really current in the, in the maneuvers. But then again, even proficiency should be and can be taken to a higher standard. So we came up with professional proficiency. It's taking the time from before we ever leave the hangar example. I'm just popping off things that come to mind. We have students that come here from all over the country and it's been a fascinating thing for us for the last two and a half years because we get to see how people are training in other environments, other, other states, you know, different. Some places are warm, some places are colder. And everything that we do is taught to a standard. The FAA has a standard. So everything that we do should be pretty much similar across the board. And we find that most things are. However, we get to see things again because we are doing advanced ratings or we're helping somebody finish a private or we're doing a commercial or we're doing a cfi. They've flown somewhere else around the country. So it's interesting when they come here, all their training's been done, all their requirements are done. They just want checkride preparation. And we tell people off the bat, we're not going to try to change the way you fly because it's very hard to change what somebody has done. But we're going to maybe show you some things that you haven't seen, show you some things that maybe might help you with a particular maneuver that you've been struggling with. Maybe we can show you a different technique that will actually help you sometimes it will help you sometimes maybe not. So going back to what I was saying, like starting from scratch, pre flighting, for example, we recently had a CFI applicant here about two months ago and he come from another part of the country and he's an airplane pilot, first airplane CFI I believe was doing all of his helicopter add ons. He's doing helicopter CFI add on. And we went to do the first pre flight. And of course when I had the panels open, I go, well, while the panels open, I'm gonna go ahead and climb up and check the rotor head. And this gentleman says, you know, you're the first person I've observed actually climb up and check the rotor head on pre flight. And I'm like, I was kind of astounded, I guess. I don't know if that's the right word or not, but I'm like, are you serious? And he's like, I'm 100 serious. I'm like, you're at the CFI level and you've never seen that the school you flew at, everybody skips bypasses climbing up and checking the rotor head. And he said, absolutely. I've never done it. I've never seen anybody do it. And I'm like, those are the kinds of things I'm talking about, right? Like professional proficiency, proficiency in a pre flight, understanding the proper pre flight from day one. Here's a gentleman at the CFI level and good dude and a great pilot. And I, I don't really can't say that any big issues with his training. But there's a flaw in the system. If a school he's been flying at through private and commercial clear up the CFI and he comes here as a finish course, already been training somewhere else for the cfi. But to finish up. And he's never climbed up and check the rotor head. It doesn't take that long. It's easy to get up there. Takes 60 seconds, couple minutes. You can grab each pitch link, you can grab the boots. You can eyeball down both rotor blades. A very simple thing that if I. I don't. I don't take the helicopter out and fly without climbing up there. Sometimes I'm lazy and I don't want to do it. I'm like, oh, God, I don't want to climb up there. But inside of me, I go, I don't want to go fly it without. Not without not climbing up there. If I don't climb up and physically grab those pitch links and grab the nuts and look at pieces and parts and just feel everything, I'm gonna feel guilty when I'm out flying, going, I should have looked at that rudderhead. Moving the helicopter in out of the hangar. I've preached about this a lot over the years. Everybody gets in a hurry. Bad things happen. I've put a tail rotor blades through a window in a hangar. One day with a dolly, we fractured Heather's foot. Moving a helicopter out or moving the. Actually moving the dolly. We've had. We had a bad flight one day because I was working with a guy on a commercial, or cfi, and I like to get the helicopter ready. When it's completely ready. We open the door, we push it out, close the door, latch everything, then call for fuel that day in a hurry. He's. This guy's like, well, hey, should we call for fuel? I'm like, yeah, okay. So I called for fuel. And then we get sidetracked. And pretty soon I hear the truck fuel pull up. So we got to hurry up, get the door open. Because I don't like making these guys wait because they treat us really, really well. And when I call them, they're like fire ems and they're right here. But we rush, moving the helicopter out because we got sidetracked. And just that, that one move of hurrying up with the door, hurrying up at the wheels, pushing the aircraft out, getting it set, getting the door closed, you know, try to keep heat in the building. We rushed. And that flight that day just kind of sucked. The whole entire flight sucked. It was windy that day, and we got flustered moving it outside. That was wrong, right? Taking the time. Every single time you go to fly for the day, no matter what your situation is with us, our rule is take the time on the pre flight. Do the pre flight properly, open the door Push it out, get the door latched, make sure the latches are on. Do we have everything we need? Then call for fuel so that it only takes those guys about three minutes to get here. We can be kind of getting our, our thoughts together. Aircraft's outside. And again, I'm just throwing out simple, little tiny things that I could think of that go above and beyond. And another big thing that we're seeing and that I've learned is as these people, guys and girls, are coming from around the country, and they'll be in a big rush. They're getting a big rush when we get in the cockpit. And I'm like, what are you doing? Why are. Why are we going so fast? And they'll say, well, that's because that's what they want. And I'm like, well, that's what who wants? Well, that's what my instructor wants. Really? Well, that's what my flight school wants. I'm like, really? You've been trained to hurry, hurry, hurry, rush, rush, rush, go, go. And they, and they say, and they often tell us that. They're like, yes, absolutely. So we see this repeatedly, over and over and over, rushing the startup. There's no reason for it ever. It should never be rushed. Why is that happening? Because flight schools. Flight schools have a hard time staying in business. If you're in this business and you've been around it for any length of time, you know that flight schools come and go. A lot of people lose money because they'll throw a big chunk of money at a flight school, buy a bunch of training at a discount, and then the next day the door was closed, guys are gone, doors are locked, chains on the door, can't get your money, aircraft's gone. Right. Flight training is difficult. It's a very, very hard business, especially for helicopters. So these small flight schools, and I'm guilty of it, doing it 15 years ago when I ran a little school in a totally different environment, I learned my lesson. It's very difficult to make money. And that's why flight schools will push you and instructors will push you to hurry, hurry, go, go, go. That is wrong. A hundred percent. That's not proficiency. Going fast and hurrying through the checklist, that's not proficiency. That's rushing. Something's going to get you hurt or get you killed later because you forgot something. So professional proficiency. That should be. Every time we walk that aircraft, we're going to do that. Walk around. We're not going to walk. We're not going to. Or not going to run we're not going to hurry. We're going to walk to the aircraft, we're going to walk around the aircraft, we're going to climb inside, take our time putting our seat belts on. And I can tell you where that comes from. I have a background in fire department, police department. I ran a towing service, heavy duty towing service for over 10 years and I spent five years in EMS. Well, when I went to the EMS environment, I'd already had all the law enforcement experience, emergency experience, first responder stuff where you rush, rush, rush, you go, go, go, you run to the police car, you run to the fire truck. Gung ho, right? That's how most of that, how most of that goes. So when I went to my first EMS base, first job, I go there and I meet the base manager. And I think it's before he'd sent me for my initial training in the BK117. And he said, so I see you have a background in emergency services, police department, fire department, all that. And I'm like, yep. And he said, so you probably have in your career, you've run to the, you've run to the police car, you've run to the fire truck. And I'm like, absolutely have. And he's like, all right, now you're in helicopter ems. And let me tell you, we do not run to the helicopter. And the general public doesn't like to hear this. People. Sometimes you'll get funny comments from people. But we were trained. He said, you walk to the helicopter, you walk around the helicopter before, you climb in and you hand touch every single panel around that aircraft. You climb in, you pull out your checklist, and you go through your checklist step by step. And they told us at the company, they said, guys, we are paying you as though you're hauling boxes of nails. And people think, oh my God. Well, no, but your life's, you're supposed to be saving lives. No, we're not. As the pilot, as an EMS pilot, your job is to safely transport everyone from point A to point B and not rush and make a mistake and get somebody killed. It's an emergency to the medic and nurse in the back. It's emergency at the scene where you're landing, where there's fire department, EMS and all the chaos. We have to keep a calm, cool head. And we have to fly that aircraft like we're hauling boxes of nails. And that's not to be cruel, that's to keep everybody safe. That's professional proficiency, taking your time, climbing the aircraft, not rushing. And in school they give you instance after instance where some, some guy and they'll show you a video created from a real life incident. And I remember one where the pilot's up front and there's a young blonde girl in the back seat, or not the back seat in the back of the aircraft and you see him looking back at her. At the time I had a young daughter at home. I, I understand the thought process. Hey, this girl's really, really bad. Can you hurry, can you rush? And he makes a mistake on the startup. He knows he made a mistake, but he continues on through the checklist and they end up having a fatal crash after the fact they learned something mistake he made during that startup. So a startup has to be done properly, it has to be done methodically, it has to be done with a checklist. So all these flight schools teaching you to go, go, go, hurry, hurry, hurry. Why would you ever be doing that in a training environment if in the EMS environment where we all had 2000 hours or more, we're flying a 6 million dollar aircraft, professionally maintained, and we walk to the helicopter, we climb in slowly, we put our seat belts on, we pull out the checklist and we go through that checklist step by step. That's the way it needs to be done. Again, just things coming up off the top of my head. I feel like I got all serious right off the bat where this was going to be more laid back. I haven't. Heather's over there monitoring comments. Is there anything anybody's asked about or any questions? Nice. I see we got like five likes on there. So what we're gonna be doing again, we'll mention 50 off right now. Helicopter line, ground school through midnight tomorrow night, New Year's Eve. The links are down below this video. The private pilot, commercial instrument, cfi, those are all down there. And the pro pilot is down there. And Heather came up with a special for anybody watching. If you've happened along this video on the pro pilot, we're already offering one hour. I'm gonna do one hour zoom with you if you purchase between now and midnight. But we're going to add an additional hour if you watch this video. Just mention it when you sign up. I'll do two one hour sessions I'll do with you whether you're preparing for a check ride or you're preparing for a flight review and you haven't, you're rusty. Or maybe you're going for your first helicopter job and you want some help with, you know how to do an interview and how to talk to people and how to network whatever you might need industry wise. We'll add that second hour. And Heather, also want me to give you a private pilot study guide. So that's 100 value that we're going to add to anybody that purchases now between now and midnight New Year's Eve. So we've got a rough draft of this professional proficiency course. Like I said, we're going to do a series of videos on those today. I want to kind of make a introduction to what it is we're going to be talking about. Anything that takes you above the average, right? It. Anybody can just be average. Go. Just go to Jobo joblo flight school. Study kind of just enough to get by fly with instructors who. Well, you know, yeah, you should do that. But that's okay. You don't have to. Right? Like, it's the full attitude of do you want to do the job or do you want to do the job the right way? Do you want to be the best that you can be? We recently had a. A young girl come to fly with us for 10 hours looking at becoming a helicopter pilot. And her family wanted to go somewhere experienced or with some experienced instructors, not newbies. And nothing against the new instructor. I was new once. We were all there in the beginning. But we know with brand new instructors, sometimes they're starting from scratch and they're just honing their craft. They're just starting to learn. And she came and flew with Hauser and I for 10 hours. Hauser did five of it, and I did five of it, and she did really, really well. And she'll have a good career ahead of her. And the last day her dad came with her and hung out with us while we're out flying. He actually got to go up right around the back. On her last flight, he rode in the back seat in the R44. And when we got done, we're having a nice chat, and he's like, you know, so what do you think? And I said, I think she did great. In the 10 hours, she picked things up quick. She had a real nice touch. She listened. She was hovering the thing. In 10 hours, she was hovering it doing 60° to Earth, 90° turns, 180 turns, both directions, 360 turns. She was taking off, landing. We had her talking on the radio in the pattern and was doing really, really well. So he asked me, he's like, well, how do we do this and how do we do it right and how do we do it, you know, to try to make the most of our money as we can do it. And I flat out told him, I said, I can, let's sit back for five minutes and I'll tell you how you're going to do this. Knowledge, it's about learning the ground school. It's about being as knowledgeable as you can. And this is the same thing I've been preaching for 20 some years, but especially inside hogs and all these videos for years and years and years. It's all about the knowledge. The more knowledge you get in the beginning, the smoother the training is going to go in the aircraft. The more knowledge, training goes easier. And if you study. And I said, she needs to study and she needs to study hard and really apply herself. I said, because you know what it takes to be better than the average pilot? Not that hard. It's apply yourself in its study because many pilots, nature of people, they're gonna go just kind of, oh, they're gonna score 72 and they're gonna kind of learn enough and well, I'm good enough for this. And ah, that maneuver is okay, you know, that's good enough. There's good enough and there's going above the standard. Another thing that's coming up in our conversations was we want to train not only to a standard, we want to train to above standard. Our examiner that we've been using for 28 years, every check ride, we get to sit in for the first 15 minutes before they actually start the questioning. And then he boots us out. He will say everything every time. There's a standard that we're going for today. You got to be standard to passing what we'd like to see. We don't expect perfection, but we like to be above the standard. And he said, I know Kenny and Kenny's people. This is the type of school that they run. They train to above standard. And he says he's been in the business while he's been at DP for 38 years, but he's trained thousands of pilots over the years, ran an EMS operation for over 30. And he said, I hold my pilots to a higher standard than the FAA standard. Here's the FAA standard. Here's, here's my standard. I want you higher, I want you better. So my, my advice to this young lady and her father was, and I go on, I don't care how you study, whether you use hogs or you want to just get the basic materials of what a person has to have for the ratings and you want to study that way or you want to go through YouTube find the videos that you want. I don't care what kind of courses you use. Of course, Hogs is what I think she should use. But I said it's all about the knowledge. And if she wants to excel, yes, it's work. But you can very easily become better than the average person if you're. If you're interviewing with 10 people, you can be better than nine of those people by really applying yourself and really hammering out the knowledge. From the beginning. We've. With all these CFIs, we've been doing a couple of them. Well, we recently did a CFI, and she had a hundred percent on the FOI and 100 on the CFI, 100 on the written test. And I know people will tell you, oh, well, just get 70 or better. Just get 70. 70 is good enough. Nobody cares. Examiner doesn't care. Just get a 70. You can do that. You're just trying to meet the standard. Why not go the extra mile to get a good score? Try to get in the high 80s or get into the 90s. This applicant, you know, she had 100%. And the examiner's like, well, there's no endorsement here for failures on the written test. Just kind of teasing, right? But he's kind of said it, kind of gruff. And she goes, that's right. And he goes, why not? She goes, because I got it 100%. And he goes, yeah, exactly. We didn't need the endorsement for what she'd missed on the written because she had 100%. Right? That's going above the standard. That's putting the time in, that's putting the effort in to be better than the average. Go to that professional proficiency. Anything else popping up? Any questions? Heather, if you have any questions. Oh, I see 19 people, seven likes. If you have any questions, Heather's over there. She'll interrupt me when I take a little break. Yes. Yeah, we have somebody else coming out in January, and this gentleman's got. I get 100 on two of them, right? Or 101. 99 on the other. And I'm like, phenomenal, right? I already know again, 70s passing. It's good enough. But we qualify people before we let them come out for the final approach course. We have this big, long screening that we do, and we have you answer a bunch of series of questions. And one of the things, if you don't. If your written test is not done, you don't qualify at all. It's like, get the written done. Call us back. But we don't even want to talk to each other. Written. This is a finishing course. Written test, people wait till the last minute. Get those stupid written done, get those things done early, get them out of the way and put those behind you. What's that? Yeah, I think he went on and did AGI scored 100 on AGI. I'm like, that is a. That is a ton of material and for somebody to score like that, that's incredible. I'm not telling you. Y' all gotta go get 100. It's not what I'm saying. A good score in the 90s, you know, good score in the 80s, 70 is good enough. Do you want to just be good enough or do you want to be better? So we'll just kind of glance over. We've started printing out like a, we have a base, a template and there's a lot of content that's going to be with this. And again, we're gonna be shooting these videos beginning of January. We'll have a sign up where you can sign up with your email and get like a free PDF and we really honestly think that we're going to take those videos and we'll trim down the. Hey. Like and subscribe and trim all that stuff out and put it in a. A free course that you'll be able to sign up for with your email where we talk about a lot of these things. Just things to think about, things to make you go above the average. Training shouldn't be guessing, hoping or memorizing. Proficiency is confidence, clarity and consist consistency. Too many students can hover fine, but they end up fell in the world. Yeah, they can fly the helicopter just fine. That's what happened to me. That's why I failed my first check ride. I failed my first check ride because I could go out, I could fly the helicopter, I could do every single maneuver. And I switched flight schools at one point and I fly with this instructor and he's like, we go out and he's like, man, you're pretty much checkride ready. He's like, what'd you score on your written? And I'm like, written? And he goes, your written's not done. I'm like, no. And he goes, you're flying all the maneuvers to a private pilot standard and your written's not done. I'm like, no. He goes, all right, we got to go back and do some ground. So we go back and we sit in the office and he's like, what types of clouds are those outside? And I'm like, big puffy white ones. And he's like, oh, my God. Because we have a serious amount of work to do. We did a bunch of ground and I still failed. I didn't fail the flying. I felt the ground. And probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I spent six months studying to go back and aced it when I went back because there was no way I was going to fail again. And that failure did create. It's why I'm sitting here today doing what I'm doing, right? It's because I understand what it's like to fail a lot of time on a failure. On a check ride. Sometimes you can finish up the same day. It hit me so hard, I took off. I took six months off. I went home. Tele to my legs felt like just this worthless, you know, Pos because I. Because I didn't pass. And it was all about the knowledge. It was all about the knowledge. You can't outfly bad ground knowledge. I love that you can't out fly bad ground knowledge. We had a gentleman one time, I was working for another company and he wealthy individual had the money to just do whatever he wants. And we got flying in the helicopter. And I keep wanting to do ground. Themes like, yeah, I just want to do ground. Then one day he says to me, well, I want to do all the flying first, and then I want to do the ground school. And I'm like, ain't gonna happen, mister. You can't do it that way. Well, why not? I'm the customer. I have the money. I want to fly, I want to do all the flying, and then I'll do the ground. And I'm like, you know what? There's a certain amount of things in the far aim, a certain amount of things that you have to know before we ever send you solo. There's a certain amount of ground subjects has to be covered, has to be logged. You have to understand airspace and radio communication, and there's a lot you have to know. So you're never going to get a license if you won't do ground. We're never going to get there. It's never going to happen. So this guy argues with the guy that I work for and he's like, kenny, you're jeopardizing the sale of a brand new helicopter with this customer. And I'm like, I mean, I, I. These guys I worked for, nice guys. But I said, you know what? I don't really give a. I don't care. Well, you know, we're trying to sell him this brand new aircraft. I go, I know, but I explained it to the guy I worked for, he doesn't want to do the ground. I can never even solo the guy, he'll never do a written pre solo written. He'll never have the knowledge. There's no way this, this isn't going to work. And this gentleman's a pilot, he knows how this is supposed to go. Well, can we bring somebody else in to work with this guy? And I'm like, hire somebody else if you want to. Ain't gonna work with me. That's not how this goes. That's not how it works. You have to learn the knowledge. The knowledge goes along with the flying. Too many rated pilots lose proficiency because they stop sharpening skills. I recently had somebody on social media, we did a video on something and some smart ass, oh, I fly commercially and I'll never fly the pattern again. So who cares about your pattern flying? I think I did a video on like the art of the pattern, right? It's almost like a little bit of an art form to go out and do a really nice pattern, do all the radio work, make you a nice approach, a nice takeoff, and understand a good pattern. And if you're out flying commercially, you might not be flying a lot of patterns. But guess what, if you're flying commercially, you're going to have 135 check rides. You're going to go to have flight interviews. When you go to work somewhere for some on social media to go, ah, screw your pattern. I haven't flown a pattern in eight years. I don't even know how to fly the pattern anymore. That's for newbies. Well, that's a moronic statement. If you're truly a commercial pilot, you're going to have flight reviews, you're going to have checkouts, you're going to have job interviews. If you let those skills diminish a flying the pattern, how's that going to look up when you show up for that job? That's not professional proficiency. Oh, he's a commercial pilot all right, but he doesn't see the need to know how to fly a proper pattern anymore because he's a commercial pilot. You know, attitudes like that, just ridiculous. Here's what I like. If your mind understands the maneuver, your hands follow. All right, think about that. If your mind understands the maneuver, your hands follow. So when we go out there in the aircraft and in the beginning, like let's take hovering for example, we're going to give you just the pedals and then we're going to have you just the collective and then we're going to have you just do the cyclic, and then you start learning how to put. I'm going to put these together with this, and then I'm going to put the collector together with this. And then I'm going to do this and just the petals. And then eventually we're going to have you do all three. It's too much for the human brain. You can't sit there in the helicopter and go, okay, I'm pushing my right foot. I'm going down with my left hand. I'm twisting my wrist. I'm going right with this. That's too many different things. So in the beginning, we break those things down. But then as you want to remain proficiency proficient over the years and again, part of what brought this up was my flying in the last month and a half, where I was just taking the helicopter out and just going, you know what? Just go fly. Go fly by yourself. Go do things, work on maneuvers. Just to help keep myself above the standard above just sitting there teaching, critiquing people. I want to know that I can do it. I still love flying after 28 years. I want to continue to fly as long as I can. And if we're not out there using those muscles again, if I'm sitting there all day just talking to somebody, okay, a little more right pedal. More right pedal. Okay, watch that airspeed. Do this, do that. That's easy to sit there as an instructor and critique that person. It's harder when they go here. Well, then show me. You take the controls. You do it. It's that muscle memory, right? It's the muscle memory that needs to be there. And if we don't use it, we know how to do it. In theory, we can sit there and read the book, but if we're not out there in the aircraft and actually using our legs, using our wrist, hand up and down, right hand, and doing all those things. That's how we keep those. That muscle memory sharp. Any questions? Come on. Some. Somebody asked a question. What do you think of the idea of professional proficiency? What do you. Focus on? Safety. Everybody says they want to be safe. Every website you go to, for every aviation manufacturer, every flight school, everywhere you look, we're all about safety. Safety's number one. Safety, safety, safety. And. And we want to be right. And it's not that hard. It's not that hard to take the time to do the right thing and to be safe about something. You know, sometimes we go like, I don't know, I'm a mage. I'm gonna Say it. I'm amazed at the stupidity. I'm amazed. The things that I see go on and hear go on. And we hear horror stories. You can imagine after 14 years of being where we're at, doing what we're doing online, communicating with people, text, emails, phone calls, the things that we see in here that are going on out there in the industry, it's, it's crazy. And we don't even, we don't even really get shocked anymore, right? We just, like somebody will be telling us a story and I'll go, not that uncommon. And they'll go, seriously, you hear stuff like this and we'll go, huh? Yeah. I mean, I remember one of my first jobs when I was young and hungry for the hours. I worked at a flight school one time where I knew their maintenance wasn't, it wasn't what it should have been. And I chose to continue to fly because I needed the paycheck and I needed the hours. And we would talk amongst ourselves, the pilots. And I remember the first time I applied for a, a job flying a turbine aircraft and talking to that gentleman and I was like, well, you know, I'm kind of getting fly tired of flying junk. And he goes, I know he goes, I was there where you were at one point in my career and I was looking to move into, I think it was MD500 flying news or something like that. And he was like, well, that's, you know, you're paying your dues now, but the idea is always to move into bigger, better aircraft. And I just don't, I just don't understand a lot of things that go. Goes on. So we'll talk about our courses just for a minute. What, how we've designed hogs and how we help you get through these ratings. Private, commercial, CFI instrument. We have structured modules and what. Basically when we set everything up, we follow the Helicopter Flying Handbook, right? There's a lot of different things out there, different reference materials you're going to use for any of these ratings. But the Helicopter Flying Handbook is the one that the FAA says, you as a student, you as a private pilot, you as a instrument pilot, as a commercial pilot, as a flight instructor, and as a FAA examiner or designated examiner. The FAA wants all of us to be using the standard of the Helicopter Flying Handbook. So that's how we originally set up our courses, was to kind of follow the Helicopter Flying Handbook. In the beginning we'd make our app videos that were an hour long and I can remember editing videos are hour long and trying to Critique and watch them. And it didn't take me long to figure out nobody, but nobody wants to watch an hour long video. And you know, back in the day I used King's videos, I think years and years ago for my instrument stuff. And I can remember just falling asleep in the chair. It was VHS tapes at the time, right? But all right, pause, take a little nap, wake back up, play, start falling asleep, pause. That's the way we did it. So all of our videos are short. We make them short. We try to keep them five to 10 minutes. Sometimes it might go a little bit longer. But we want you to be able to go in and maybe you're catching a couple videos during your lunch or you're after supper, you want to hit a couple videos in the evening, whatever you can go in and 5, 10 minutes of the time work through as many videos as you can. But that way you've got time to absorb, try to absorb the information, go back and watch it again if it didn't make sense. We use quizzes at the end of each section. This was inspired by people asking for quizzes. But we now our courses are used at a community college where our courses are the whole entire curriculum, curriculum for their, all of their ratings. So the they follow our courses as they're doing the flight training at this community college. All this goes in as a permanent record. So we have quizzes on every single module. Like we'll have, for example, Private pilot might have 18 lessons, 18 modules. Each module has a quiz at the end of it so that as you're going through those modules you can test your knowledge. We have FAA practice tests at the end of each course. So let's say Private Pilot, you're going through Private Pilot, you go through all the videos. At the very end of the private pilot course, we have FAA written test practice. It's set up so it's time. Just like the FAA test, it asks the same type of questions. They're from the FAA data bank and they're also available for wings credit. So our computers every morning report at 10am to the FAA wing site and you can get wings credit for the practice test. And you can take those as many times as you need it. So you can be using the information to learn the ground knowledge using the quizzes as you're going through the modules. And then the FAA wings practice test at the end we have practice trackings or progress tracking. So as you're going through those courses, you'll be able to see, oh, okay, I've watched all that video. I watched all that video. Oh, I stopped short on that one. I only watched 50%. Let me go back and finish that one. So it will keep track of what you've watched and what you haven't and how much. We have AI, of course, everybody has AI now or not everybody. Most people. We have 14 years of our content. Free paid content, paid content. Everything's loaded into our AI and it's Kenny's clone. Looks and sounds like me, talks way better, has much better memory and which every single video and every course, our A is right. AI is right there. So you can watch a video and if you have a question, ask the question right there from AI and get an answer immediately on the spot. That's just some of the benefits of how the online school helps. Those links are all down below this video link for private pilot, commercial pilot, instrument pilot, CFI and then certified flight instructor. So 50% off of all of those between now at midnight tomorrow night, you can ask Heather a question right now in chat if you like. You can also text or call Heather at 574-767-1797 and she can answer majority of your questions about membership. You can also go to ask hogs.com talk to our clone about whatever you might want to talk about. Helicopter oriented. But specifically for the cell, you need to go to customer service again, 574-767-1797 and I'm about. Throat's getting dry. Any other questions pop up? Nothing. Well, let's see. So yeah, again we're going to be introducing more of this. We'll be doing content and we'll make a PDF that's going to be available to you. A short video course, professions professional proficiency. It's about being better than the other, going above a standard, doing what's safe. I think I'll wrap it up right there. Yes, we're doing final approach courses for February now we have three CFI booked already for January. We have two that are going together mid month, one the end of the month in the R44. And news R22 is coming back. The R22 has been gone for some repairs. We ended up finding a crack in the frame on a pre flight that we don't know exactly where it came from or how it happened. It's an older aircraft, so went in for service and they removed that section of the frame, ordered it from Robinson. It's all reinstalled, put back together. It should be arriving back soon. So we had to hold off on R22, check rides for a little bit until we knew that aircraft would be back. So it should be back. I believe the owner has it right now and he's just testifying a little bit. And then should be arriving beginning of January next week should be back. So if you want to schedule an R22 or an R44 course, you can get details again with Heather at 574-767-1797. You can go to finalapproachcourse.com and see 30. Whatever our top is now, 34 or 35 people that have been through check right with us in the last two and a half years, either R4, R44, R22. And@finalapPROACHCOUR.com you can go ahead and fill out the questions because we're going to ask you things like are you a rated pilot? Do you have a medical? Have you passed your written. Are you going for initial? Are you going for an add on which rating explains about our pricing level. That's how you qualify to see if you're a good fit. And if you're not ready at this time, no problem, you can go finish up whatever requirements you need to do. We can talk to you about it, give you some guidance and steering the right direction. But what the final approach course is, we help people who have been struggling with trying to finish a rating somewhere. And there's a whole long list of reasons, but it varies from our examiner's book for six months, which we hear that all my instructor just left. They're looking for a new instructor. Aircraft's down for annual. It's down for just like the man maintenance we just had to do on the R22 helicopters break. That's what they do. They need lots of maintenance. But some places aircraft go down for sometimes a substantial period of time, somebody can't get a check ride done along with a whole list of other reasons. So the final approach course is. We developed it. If you have you're working on a rating and you've got we've had people come up here for a private that had upwards of 160 to 180 hours. And the guy that actually inspired our final approach course had 200 and all these are all people working on their private. And that's where we saw the need when we did this first gentleman who had he bought a new R44. He had eight instructors over two years and he had 200 hours and still didn't have a rating. And we brought him and his aircraft up and finished him up in a week. We just had to help him polish. He just needed somebody to help him put the finishing touches on everything. Get a checkride set. The examiner we use we've been using for 28 years. So 25 years, whatever it is now. It's not like we don't know how the test is going to go. We know how to prepare you and get you ready and make it all happen. So if you haven't done it yet, subscribe for us. Do it. We're trying to hit 50000 subscribers. Been working on that for 14 years. I know it's a long time. We got a measly 49,000, almost 600 as of today. Personal thing of mine. I want to hit 50000 subscribers and then after that I don't think I care anymore. Just sounds cool. Have 50 000, not 49, 550,000. So do us a favor. Subscribe the channel and click that little bell to be notified of the upcoming professions professional proficiency videos and we'll see in the next video. Peace out. Links are all down below. See you on the inside, Hogs.