Why I Cancelled My Checkride and Stopped My Helicopter Training

so yesterday i cancelled my private pilot helicopter check ride i was supposed to take that on august 30th and discontinued my helicopter flight training so today let's talk about what happened and why i won't be getting my helicopter private [Music] add-on what's up everybody it's mover um i wish i didn't have to make this video today i actually started i was gonna do a mover mail bag but i got to one of the uh first things that was helicopter related and before i go any uh further i decided it's time to talk about what happened and like the title suggested this is not clickbait this really did happen i am no longer in helicopter flight training and i cancelled my check ride so to start off uh this is a hundred percent on me uh i don't blame anyone else for what has happened i take full responsibility because no matter what happened the ultimate responsibility for my training is me it doesn't matter what the external circumstances are it doesn't matter what happened it was on me to make sure my training was accomplished in a timely manner and successfully so what i would caution people is from you know getting angry at other parties or taking sides or whatever so i'm gonna change some of the names uh in the story just to prevent any you know anybody getting angry or anything like that but there are some parts that i'm going to talk about the most factual way that i can because i think it's important to add all the other information amplifying data so let's get started with the probably the biggest update so as you remember from the last vlog i did not think i was going to make a helicopter flight training vlog this week because you guys were caught up with my training based on the airspeed indicator stuff and me going and flying t-38s and last week i was out at eglin flying to t-38 so didn't think um you know i wasn't sure but lester and i actually were scheduled to fly my um or he was going to come out with me i was going to do my one hour of night solo on sunday while i was at eglin i got a phone call lester was involved in a small aircraft mishap so i was very worried about him just to put that out there right now he is okay he was in very serious condition at the time of the mishap he spent uh several days in the hospital and some surgeries and stuff and if we do a gofundme i'll let you guys know but he was injured in the mishap and um you know he's now home and recovering so i'm very thankful for that i was very worried about it but uh at that time i had seven hours of solo left and we were going to do um a couple we had already done some of the check ride prep but we were going to do like a pre-mock check ride just to make sure i was ready and a check ride you know the some of the check ride prep prior what that drove was lester medically you know obviously having had some surgeries and stuff is is not capable of flying with me at least for the near future maybe several weeks maybe several months so um that caused us to to scramble because the check ride was scheduled on august 30th and when i say us there's another student involved we'll just call him g who is with a local law enforcement agency that i know and i'm friends with and they were using lester to get uh their uh ppl done and we were in contact we were gonna take our check ride on the same day to save the examiner you know the trouble of of he was coming out to new orleans specifically for this and so he was going to get two check rides done they have much comp more complicated situation which i won't go into you know based on how government agencies work and stuff but we were trying to find a plan that would work for both of us so um after scrambling around a little bit it's very hard so to speak to find a qualified certified flight instructor in the local area that is current and qualified on the robinson r22 r44 there are a couple places around but r22 there's just nobody i mean the nearest we could find was lafayette which made sense because the examiner was coming from lafayette so we were just going to change a check ride location and do the prep with this guy from lafayette who agreed to do this so we thought we had a pretty good plan a couple days prior to the check ride we were going to fly the helicopter down to lafayette and fly with the cfi and do our check ride prep make sure we were good to go then take the check ride on that sunday with that plan in mind uh lester finally got out of the hospital very thankful about that you know he was okay and was recovering i told him hey i'm going to go out to the airport on wednesday which is a couple days later and make sure that you know and start my solo because i've got two weeks and you know seven and a half hours is not much in two weeks but i still have to do a solo cross country i had an hour of night and then the check ride prep so i wanted to get started on that and get back into things so because i have a pic endorsement no problem um you know go fly i showed up at the airport at 8 30 as i had mentioned and the plan was for me to show up at the fbo which great bunch of people uh the the woman who manages uh that operation at the desk there is good friends with lester had coordinated for us to get access to the helicopter and for us to get a ride out there you know because we didn't have uh the gate card or anything because we were just students so i get out there and i'm going to fly it and they said i said hey can i get a ride and they're like well yeah and i said well can you help me push the helicopter out and they said yeah no problem they said but you don't really need to like why well because it's already sitting out there like what are you talking about so i walk out on the flight line which is across the ramp from where the t-hangers are and the helicopter's sitting there and the blade is starting the rotor blades are starting to turn i'm like that's interesting so she calls um the only other person involved and we're going to call him dj for the purposes of the story and i had met so let's back up i had met dj all of two times and i wasn't impressed i'll be honest first time i met him he had a boot on his foot and i didn't know really who he was i didn't really understand the dynamic of who did what with this whole program and this whole operation because it's part 61 and it's very complicated i just knew the owner of the helicopter uh was subleasing it or leasing it to someone else and that's really all i understood at that point so i met dj within six seconds six to nine seconds of meeting him i was not very impressed didn't seem all that sharp to me and he was flying with a boot on his foot in a broken foot he was going out and taking passengers to fly around in this r-22 for some other thing and i was like that's a little weird didn't think much of it heard some stories about him i know he had uh crashed an r-44 trying to land it on a trailer and nearly took out a gulf stream in the process that was parked nearby and heard some other stories about how he had flown fairly aggressively which worried me a little bit because the r22 has had rotor blade separation issues they get stress cracks especially like cattle ranchers and stuff typically find that and i was worried with a guy like this flying it because you know i didn't want the stress cracks i didn't know what his role was i didn't really like the idea of him flying it aggressively i met him a second time he had a student that was like one or two hours into the program and he was flying with the boot again which i still thought was weird and then he kind of vanished and he disappeared because i guess he had something a surgery or something with the foot and never saw him again it wasn't going to be a factor because i was going to be done with my check ride and stuff when the front desk uh lady called him he said oh i'm just gonna be 20 minutes and i'll be over there and i'm like okay you know 20 30 minutes is not a problem he lands 35 minutes later and tells her i need you know eight gallons of fuel each side and she's like well aren't you gonna let you know lester's student who had scheduled to fly fly the helicopter and he's like yeah when i'm done he was very rude and wouldn't even make eye contact with me so um i was a little weirded out by that i guess and i she said well when are you gonna be done and and uh he goes i don't know and then so i ask i go so how long are you planning on using this helicopter when can i use it he goes soon and i get a little aggravated at this point so i go what is soon and he said two hours i said well i'm not waiting around for that so i called lester didn't really want to bother him because he's obviously recovering and all this stuff and uh the owner of the helico i guess she called the owner of the helicopter and was trying to he didn't want to get involved which rightfully so lester said i'll i'll see about it and get back to you so later on in lester knew our plan of going to lafayette and flying this other instructor and later on he calls me and he says hey man i hate to tell you this but if you want to complete your check your stuff now to get it over with you have to fly with this dj and i said absolutely not because you know after that interaction after hearing about all his stuff i heard other stories about how aggressive he flew and you know unsafe and i just i was getting to the point where i wasn't even comfortable getting in the helicopter because i didn't want to fly it after this guy because i didn't trust anything i later found out that the dynamic in place and again we're not we're not blaming people i'm not going to blame lester or anything like that because i you know i i don't i think he did what he could um the helicopter was leased to dj who subleased it to leicester and so everything was done under dj's insurance uh his cfi insurance and all the maintenance was done and remember maintenance we were talking about airspeed indicators and how we couldn't get it fixed well so um he would not allow after lester talked to him he would not allow the cfi and lafayette to fly the helicopter because he didn't want to put him on the insurance which i understand it's probably expensive and i knew it was going to be an uphill battle wouldn't allow that to happen so basically it was either fly with dj or not and after my interaction with him that morning and you know the fighter pilot enemy says you know let's push forward let's get it done i can accept the risk but you know the safety officer and opso that i've been in previous life in the military says when things get too complicated at this point it's time to step back and it's time to reevaluate and after everything that we have been through from the annual stuff the airspeed indicator and now this i thought it was just time to to stop so the other piece to that puzzle too um the helicopter robinson helicopters have about a 200 hour uh 12 year life before they have to go through a major overhaul and it's a drop dead time and so that helicopter was getting close to timing out with myself and the other student there was only about 20 or 30 hours of slop and dj had been flying with a student and flying by himself for several days prior to that uh prior to my interaction with him which means that you know they were burning time off that so i was getting very close it was about to be a position where we might even time out before i even finished so um there's a point where you know you're doing this for recreation you're doing this for a hobby you're doing this for fun and it's just time to stop and there unfortunately there are no other robinson 22 options in the area there are no other small helicopter options in the area the nearest um the next door flight school that's got an r44 offered it to me and then there's another flight school in baton rouge that offered their r44 to finish but with the amount of time it takes to get qualified in the r44 in an ad that would add another three to five thousand dollars to the cost on top of what i was already gonna do i mean it was so i had 10 hours left in the r44 and then add another three to five thousand dollars on top of that which meant you know almost ten thousand dollars just to finish and that just isn't something i'm willing to do right now so uh that's what happened uh i do not blame uh i can't stress this enough i lester tried his best lester was a good instructor i enjoyed flying with him i'm still his friend i'm still worried about him if his you know if he decides to his family decides to do a gofundme to help with medical costs i will absolutely put that on the channel here and i hope we will all support him because lester is a great instructor but he it's not his school and it's not his operation so he's kind of hamstrung and it's the only one within a 200 mile radius and that's the problem is there's no other options and so this it just we've reached the limit so what's next um when the airspeed indicator stuff happened i started looking at other options because i didn't know if that was going to get resolved and i didn't want to keep pushing the issue so i contacted some schools in texas which a lot not ideal because you know i have to go there and be gone and i hate being away from the dogs and i hate you know having to go back and forth now between eglin and this luckily i'm still on a leave of absence from the airline so i can still do it but it's still a lot of being gone but that's the option now and so i found a school in texas probably going to start in october i'm going to use the gi bill and so people have asked about the gi bill the reason i haven't used the gi bill yet is because it has to be a part 141 school and it has to be your commercial pilot add-on it cannot be your private pilot so i couldn't use the gi bill for what i was doing and there's no schools anywhere around here that use it but now the new plan is i'm going to use the gi bill go to a school in texas and i'm going to let's basically start from scratch 35 hours which it's not really starting from scratch because i will have already had all that experience you know 22 hours behind me 23 hours behind me so i'll already have that experience i can already solo a helicopter i can already fly it fairly well it will be a break i'm going to start in october so it might be you know six weeks off which i'm going to use the pro flight trainer dcs x-plane to try to stay current try to keep my skills up but i'm going to start and i'm going to go straight to a commercial pilot add-on and hopefully it'll take you know between two and three weeks in texas to get it done and now i'll walk away with a commercial pilot license in an operation that i can actually trust with a maintenance program that i can hopefully actually trust and a situation where i as a customer i'm treated fairly and again this is not lester this is the circumstances around lester so i hope that this all makes sense i'm going to you know when i'm done i'm gonna fly with lester some more you know i want to bring him back on the channel he's been a lot of fun uh he's a great guy uh he was a good sport when the shirts and stuff he was he's a good person uh i just think that you know he's kind of a victim of this this situation and not having the ability to start his own so he's kind of the mercy of other people so um it just sucks and i'm hoping he has a speedy recovery and gets back to flying soon because obviously having had the mishap you know it's gonna take some time for him to recover and stuff thankfully he is back uh walking a little bit and he's back at home recovering so those are all very good things and we're very fortunate that it wasn't much worse so anyway so that's the end of that um i'm gonna move on to do the mover mail bag in another video here but i just wanted to update you on why there won't be any more helo vlogs uh in the near future maybe ever i don't know depends on what the new school's policies are and kind of what we agree to moving forward but i'll at least update you on the progress as it goes along and there may be a time in october where there aren't any vlogs coming from the channel because i'll be away and it's very hard to edit and create videos when i'm gone just don't have the bandwidth and hotels and don't have the processing power on my laptop so anyway that's it hope that explains it uh i hope uh again no hard feelings for anybody involved even dj uh even you know the the people involved i understand it's business and they think they're doing the right thing and i think i'm doing the right thing and you know it's it's my prerogative to walk away at this point so thanks for watching uh thanks for watching all the hello hello vlogs it was a lot of fun making them uh hopefully we can do more aviation stuff in the future obviously this is not the end of the channel it's just the end of the hilo stuff i will still have dcs videos and uh mover mailbag coming up here uh in a day or so and then i'm gonna do a thing about the uh ai versus human darpa experiment that happened uh yesterday so anyway thanks for watching we'll see you next time excuse me oh [Music] don't be a douche that's rule number one

Channel: C.W. Lemoine

Views: 707,979

Rating: 4.8114986 out of 5

Keywords: flying, general aviation, flight training, learning to fly, learn to fly, helicopter lessons, helicopter flight vlog, robinson, r-22, r-22 beta ii, r44, robinson helicopters, helo, gopro max, gopro

Id: N1mRkWvuWro

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020