Certified Flight Instructor Check Ride Debrief Gary Cleveland
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LIVE interview transcript below. Speakers: Kenny Keller and Gary Cleveland. This interview was done after Gary's CFI checkride.
Kenny Keller: It's Kenny with Helicopter Online Ground School.
We are going to talk to Gary about his CFI check run he did last week, we're going to do a little debrief on that. I also wanted to first point out, here's a whole bunch of our members, we're celebrating today five years online. I launched this March 1st, 2012, now it's March 1st, 2017, five years to the day. We had lunch today, we had a blast, we had food, had a cool Helicopter Online Ground School cake.
Certified Flight Instructor Check Ride Debrief Gary Cleveland
We're encouraging our members now for this month to send in their pictures. We have a ton, these are all people that are part of the family, the community, the Helicopter Online Ground School community. People that have passed their check rides. People that continue to do check rides, we got Caleb from his private, and then we got Caleb again when we did the commercial. We got Gary Cleveland standing here, we got pictures from Gary's private, his commercial, his CFI. The list goes on and on.
Holly from Colorado, Jamie that came all the way from Texas, Gary picked him up in the R44, brought him up here and we did Jamie's private, you may have seen his video. We've got even more, but I have a whole lot more testimonials, and I even call them testimonials because they're not really, it's just people email me and say, "Kenny, thank you for the help with the check ride. You helped me get through it. The Ground School was great."
Certified Flight Instructor Check Ride Debrief Gary Cleveland
They don't always send pictures, so we're asking past members, send in your pictures. Send them to my email at [email protected] or send them to my phone, text me or post them to our Facebook if you like, either my Facebook or the Ground School Facebook. We want to see your check ride pictures from four and a half years ago, we don't care, three years ago, or if you want to send some picture of maybe you went on in your CFI, you got your time, and now you've moved on and you're flying oil rigs. Send us a picture of what you're doing, let us know what you're doing, we want to expand on these.
In just the last couple days we have several people already starting to respond sending these in, where they're flying now, what they like to fly. Today, five years online. We're really proud of it, we have lots of momentum, it's been a big day. This has been a personal goal of mine was to hit five years, I figured if I could make it five I could make it 20 years.
I'm going to teach you the Heli Expo March 6th. The expo is open, the show is open seven, eight, and nine March 6th, I'm teaching two classes during a certified flight instructor clinic. Randy Rowles that writes for one of the big helicopter magazines that a lot of you probably read, he's with the Helicopter Institute, asked me or invited me to be a guest instructor with I think, I'm not sure how many other instructors. It'll be a class of about 60 people.
I'm going to do one last in on security related special use air space. I've been working on that and getting that ready to go, and I've been filming it for practice which will go into Ground School for all of our members, and then I'll be doing that class at Expo. Then I'm doing a second class with Michael Humes from Epic Helicopters, we're going to be presenting together on regulation updates. We're going to split that 50 minute session up into about half and half, and I'm going to cover some different things, he's going to cover some different stuff. Just things that have changed in the last two years that CFIs that maybe haven't been flying need to know about.
Members, send us your pics from your check rides, and/or what you're flying now, we want to hear about it. Now we're going to get Gary involved here. We went last week to Toledo, and I want to mention since we got Steve over there, if anybody wants to ask a question, go ahead and we'll check in with you in a little bit and try to answer them while we're still live.
We had a little audio problem earlier, thanks for those of you that were making comments. We didn't realize that we didn't have any audio, we're ten minutes into it and I realized the little green thing wasn't going up and down. I can see we got audio, Steve's going to monitor it and make sure we keep going, so put your questions in and we'll get to them in a minute or in a few minutes.
We did Gary's check ride over two days, oral was one day, flight was second day. We couldn't get there early because of weather, so it's okay. Everybody would love to do a check ride in a day and go home that night, but it just wasn't feasible. The oral's pretty long on a CFI for most, Gary's was around 4-4 1/2 hours, which is half of what some examiners do. Some examiners take a full day for just an oral. Gary got through the oral on the first day, it was cool to stay all night, be refreshed so when Gary went back in the next day all he had to do was just do the flight, and get his rating, and we came home. That was all good.
I'm going to let Gary talk to you a little bit about kind of how the check ride went for him. This is just a video where we could be on here for hours and hours and hours telling you every single question that the examiner asked, which isn't reasonable, so he's going to kind of just give you an idea of the things that the examiner asked him, had him do to give you an idea of how this one examiner did a check ride. Not saying that yours is going to be exactly the same, but in general they should be pretty close to the same.
Check rides are still going to the PTS, the ACS is not out yet for helicopters, so they did do the PTS and Jeff made it clear we got to cover everything. He said, "We have to get operations, we have to do FOIs." I'm going to shut up for a minute and let Gary just kind of give you a brief overview, and let him, he's got a list here of things he wanted to mention to you, just give you an idea, get a feel for what it was like. What did he start with? What was the first thing he did?
Gary Cleveland: Well, we started right off with the fundamentals of instructing, so the first question he asked is, "What's the definition of learning?"
Kenny Keller: They always do.
Gary Cleveland: Then he just spent about an hour talking about the fundamentals of instructing to make sure that I not only could spout off what I memorized being the characteristics of learning and the laws of learning, the principles of learning, the levels of learning. He broke them down and wanted some good, real life examples to help bring home the definition of each and every thing that we talked about with the fundamentals of instructing. That took about an hour I'd say.
Kenny Keller: Gary was pretty good with them, because I harped on him. He'd been working on this for a couple of months. Not full-time, working his full-time job and doing family stuff like normal, but always studying. Just trying to stay fresh on things, and for a couple of months I've been hammering him going, "FOIs what he's going to start with. If you can't get through that, then you're not even going to get through the rest of it." Several times we sat down and I would ask him questions, me kind of guessing how the examiner may pose the questions.
Each time Gary, he did well but the further we get into it, the harder it is to keep going because things are so similar. We did a couple times of just sitting down, going through things, no more than about an hour at a time. He just kept going through it, and I would kind of tell him, and he would get frustrated like any of us. I was frustrated at FOIs, we all are.
Certified Flight Instructor Check Ride Debrief Gary Cleveland
We did ours in a week, and the guys we were working with said, "You just got to keep going back to your motel room at night, and you just got to keep going over it, and you got to keep going over it. Just suck it up. You got to know them." That's what I kept telling Gary. I go, "I know it's a pain in the butt, but just keep going over it and over it and over it." Sound like you did pretty good, because they did come out about 45 minutes.
We did the first initial was all the paperwork ready, is everything ready to go. Then of course once we're ready, examiner kicks me out when the test starts, so I went out and just hung in the lobby, and Gary came out in about 45 minutes and said, "Well, FOIs are done." Anybody have any questions on FOIs or anything so far? No? Any comments at all? No?
Steve: Audio good.
Kenny Keller: Audio good, that's what we want to know. All right, audio's good. All right, so there's FOI. What did you move into next after the FOI, or did you want to say anything else about the FOI?
Gary Cleveland: No, he continued to, it was a CFI check ride so when he would ask me questions about aerodynamics or limitations of the aircraft, emergencies, after I would answer he would then sometimes say, "Well, how would you teach that to a student?" He incorporated it throughout the rest of the oral questioning as well.
Kenny Keller: Right. I was there in the beginning when, if I remember right, correct me if I'm wrong, he said to Gary, "About half this test will be general knowledge, me asking you questions, and the other half of the test will be you teaching me." Is that what he said?
Gary Cleveland: Yes.
Kenny Keller: About half and half. Okay. You got through the FOIs, you guys come out, took a quick break, you weren't out there long. Get a quick drink and you guys were back in it. Where did it go after FOIs or did you already, wherever you left off.
Gary Cleveland: He pretty much, the normal private check ride questions from that point forward that I remember from the private and the commercial check ride. He just hit them all again, the aerodynamics, limitations of the aircraft, emergency operations, weights and balance, air space, weather. Then he had to add of course endorsements, and he hit that probably for an hour talking about the different endorsements that CFI is going to have to do to fulfill your obligation and how heave the responsibility of that weighs on your shoulders.
Kenny Keller: That chunk was the part he was talking about where it's going to be like a normal check ride. Some people say, "Oh, a CFI check ride's completely different than your others." Not totally, because there's part of it that is like the private and commercial. Him just asking you questions, you answering. That was that chunk. You got through those, and then in endorsements did he give you scenarios and have you look them up?
Gary Cleveland: Yes, he had me look it up in the circular, the 6165 circular. Of course that helps get you to where you need to be for the endorsements, but it references part 61. He wanted to see that I could then go back, and dig in, and find out what it's referencing. To depend on the far aim and not just the circular.
Kenny Keller: Okay, and that's good that he brought that up, because I kept telling Gary, we downloaded here 6165 so he could take it with him, and I just kept preaching on that. I thought the examiner would be impressed with that, but then he wanted him to also use the far aim. Be familiar with the AC 6165 but also be familiar apparently with what it says in the far aim.
Gary Cleveland: Right.
Kenny Keller: Okay. Then after endorsements, then where did it go?
Gary Cleveland: We moved into the teaching part, and of course there was two subjects that I knew I was going to teach ahead of time, so I was able to prepare. The confined area landings and settling with power. We took a break, and he hit me with a couple more off the cuff lessons.
Kenny Keller: How long was your settling with power and how long was your confined area? Approximately how long do you think did you take it to teach him that lesson?
Gary Cleveland: 30 minutes each I would say.
Kenny Keller: Really? Half hour a piece. Okay, so how much of that time did he spend asking you questions as you were teaching?
Gary Cleveland: He played a 20 hour student for about the first half, and then he turned into an examiner for the second half of each lesson.
Kenny Keller: Okay.
Gary Cleveland: Took it to the point where he actually helped me to improve my lesson plan by giving me his input, towards the tail end of it.
Kenny Keller: Okay. He had you teach those two, then did you have anything you want to add to that on how you prepared or any advice for anybody that was preparing for making their lessons for the examiner?
Gary Cleveland: Well, you gave me awesome advice, being very visual. We had a nice big whiteboard there, and I just think that really helped. Then what helped me a lot is just prior to going over there for the check ride, I practiced teaching to the private student that we have right now with the R-44.
Kenny Keller: Right.
Gary Cleveland: It had given me some recent experience in teaching, and using a whiteboard, and being interrupted, and being able to get back on task.
Kenny Keller: That was good, and that's the advice I did give him. In all the online training, it's about being visual. We showed up with the big flip chart, because I couldn't remember if that particular airport had a whiteboard or not. He laughed at us when we walked in because we were carrying, Gary had all of his stuff. I wish I had the picture I would bring up and show you, but Gary's loaded down with stuff, I'm carrying stuff in, and he giggled at us when we walked in, and I go, "Well, I didn't know if you had a whiteboard or not." He goes, "Yeah, we got a whiteboard, you don't really need that."
We were prepared in case there wasn't a whiteboard, I didn't want Gary to just have to draw on a piece of paper. I wanted him to be able to be visual, and he could at least have a big flip chart that he could draw, flip pages, that's a good way to present. That's the thing I did harp to Gary a couple months in advance was just be visual, use your arms when you're talking about advancing blade, have your arm out there and be moving it. When he's talking about retreating blade, do that. Show them a video, write on the board, use a flip chart, have your helicopter handy and use the helicopter. Draw on a piece of paper if you have to.
We mentioned what you did on the FOIs, you're little trick you used. I think we should. Gary asked me if I thought this would be appropriate.
Gary Cleveland: Well, and I guess a lot of the FOIs for me as far as getting the nomenclature down was rote learning, because it was memorization of the terms. Then the meaning behind those terms kind of goes into a common sense area. I had a lot of acronyms in my mind to remember all the terms, and it was easier for me to write the acronym and to spell out each level of learning, spell out each principle of learning, each law of learning. When he would ask me about the laws of learning, I would just pull out my paper and pen and start writing them before I even responded.
Certified Flight Instructor Check Ride Debrief Gary Cleveland
Kenny Keller: Gary asked me if I thought he could do that, and I said, "Yeah, why not? If you have a blank piece of paper and you're writing down things from memory, why would that be a problem?" What was his reaction to that when you did that?
Gary Cleveland: Well, he was interested in what I was writing. He leaned forward and looked, so I mean he's a smart guy, he probably knew what I was doing. I was trying to jog my memory with the acronym, so he would interrupt me in the middle of that, and he would ask me about a specific. Like he stopped me on primacy, he said, "Primacy, what is that?" He tried to distract me, to make sure I knew the meaning behind the terms as well.
Kenny Keller: Awesome, okay. Where did we leave off on your list there? We got to the endorsements.
Gary Cleveland: We taught the two lessons that we learned, that we knew ahead, and then he hit me with a couple of off the cuff lessons.
Kenny Keller: What did you have to teach for off the cuff?
Gary Cleveland: The pressure altitude, density altitude.
Kenny Keller: You know it's funny because Gary, the examiner actually let him pick one of his own beforehand. He said, "Give me one and have Gary pick the other." Gary said, "Well, how about if I teach pressure altitude and density altitude?" I go, "Aw man, that'll be short. You could do that in five minutes. You should pick something more detailed." When Gary wanted to do that, I went, "I don't know about that one." Then the examiner asked him to do that, so I should have let Gary make his own in the first place.
Anyway, pressure altitude and density altitude, everybody screws them up. We always have, we always do, you got to go back and review those. It's common problem with students, so examiners are always going to ask about those. He had you teach those, and you turned those into like a half and hour presentation, right?
Gary Cleveland: I think it was 15 minutes for pressure altitude, density altitude, and another 15 minutes for loss of tail rotor thrust.
Kenny Keller: You told me he liked the way that you did the pressure altitude.
Gary Cleveland: Yes, he didn't have a whole lot to add to that at all.
Kenny Keller: There's several methods for figuring pressure altitude, and you can look around on the internet and see different ones. The one that we used, I like, it's the one I've always used. People say, "Well, there's an easier way." There's multiple different ways to figure it by hand, we do the drop the decimal add a zero thing, that video's on YouTube. Our examiner liked it.
Again, we're giving you results of the examiner we worked with. He's been doing it for 25 years, but these are just guidelines. Just because this examiner did it one way, we don't know what your examiner's going to do. It should be fairly close to what we're talking about. Okay, so you did that, and then what was the other off the cuff one?
Gary Cleveland: Loss of tail rotor thrust.
Kenny Keller: Okay.
Gary Cleveland: Be it total loss or loss of pedal control, one way or the other.
Kenny Keller: Okay. I want you to expand on the conversation you had with him because this is kind of cool. I think the next morning we were talking about this, and he said, "Hey, I got a video I want you to make." I said, "Okay." He goes, "There's several things that I see out there continually over and over that instructors are not teaching correctly, and they're consistently screwing up. One of them deals with thrust and loss of thrust and tail rotor failures," kind of implying that there's a lot of confusion with people on what is what.
This is another video, a topic for another video, but he said, "I'm going to give you like five other things." This is a video I'm going to do for our examiner at his request, he's going to work with me on it so that we can put out something specifically that he sees problems in training out there in the real world. We're going to do that video for everybody. I wasn't in the room, so Gary just kind of explain to us the best you can remember, because you can't remember every single word, but just what you got from him. You apparently got a feel that he was making some distinctions that people have trouble with.
Gary Cleveland: Yes. Well, yeah, I think what he was after, because as soon as we talked about total loss of the tail rotor, we talked about auto rotation is the answer for that obviously. When I started talking about the stuck pedal, or fixed thrust, or loss of thrust control, the two different approaches. The power arm approaches that you would make using steep and more power for a stuck left power, and shallow and less power in slide on for a stuck right pedal. He actually stopped in the middle of that and said, "Good. I was hoping you wasn't going to say auto rotation, because a lot of people are telling me they're going to auto rotate with loss of thrust control."
Kenny Keller: Okay. That's good stuff, so that's something, I see Steve's got a question. Before I lose my train of thought, so we are going to do a video on that at the request of the examiner, and that's one area inside Online Ground School where I'm going to work on it a little bit harder since he's telling us that he's seeing this consistently. This is an area that I'm sure I can probably improve on inside the Ground School.
Gary, now that he's got his CFI, he's going to be helping me do a lot of stuff here. He's going to be flying the Enstrom and helping me do a lot of things. We'll work in getting some new presentations for you, and improve what we have now on being more clear about the different tail rotor malfunctions.
I know that one thing that he always says is people get confused with when you're talking about, if this is your aircraft, and this is the tail boom, the tail rotor blades are pushing against the tail boom this way. When he asks somebody, "Where's the thrust?" They always go, this way. That's not what he's looking for. The thrust is against the tail boom, going against it. What's coming this way is just turbulent air. I know the last three check rides he's harped on that big time, because he said people are really messing that up. They think the thrust is this way, but the actual thrust is pushing against the tail boom.
Anyway, let's see what Steve's got. Steve's got a question.
Steve: This is kind of a two part question from Rick, asked what exactly the examiner liked about the teaching method on pressure and density altitude? It does have a lot of different ways to present, but what was his approach to teach?
Kenny Keller: Okay. I'll kind of move out of the way here and let you, if you want to step this way so they can see you better, Gary.
Certified Flight Instructor Check Ride Debrief Gary Cleveland
Gary Cleveland: Well, the way I taught it was simply looking at the altimeter setting or the non standard barometric pressure for the day. I explained that pressure altitude is basically a performance altitude for the helicopter, for non standard barometric pressure.
Then we figured it given field elevation by subtracting 2992 from the current barometric pressure to get the difference, dropped the decimal, add a zero, and if it's a low pressure day we're going to add that altitude to the field elevation and vice versa. If it's a high pressure day we're going to subtract it from the field elevation. Then we take and look at D6-B to figure the density altitude given the non standard temperature for the day.
Kenny Keller: Okay. Yeah, let us know if that answers your question. Was there another part to that question Steve?
Steve: That was the second part, what was his approach to teaching?
Kenny Keller: Okay cool. Those are great questions, thanks for putting your question in there. Hopefully that answers, if that didn't quite get your answer let us know. Steve will let us know here shortly.
Gary Cleveland: I think you got a good video in the Ground School that shows exactly that.
Kenny Keller: I do, and I actually have it free on YouTube. If you search it, it's on YouTube. It looks complicated and it seems lengthy, but it gives you the gist. Even though if you watch that video it looks complicated, just because of the way I did the video. It's really pretty simple when you get the gist of it. It is a quick way that you can do it, and you can almost do it in your head. In a round number if you had to do it in your head, you could just kind of generalize and use that method to work through it, and not have to be so crazy with the numbers.
Okay. All right, good.
Steve: Rick said it answered his question, thank you.
Kenny Keller: Awesome.
Gary Cleveland: Awesome.
Kenny Keller: Great. Glad you asked the question, glad Gary was able to answer it. What do we got next? What haven't we talked yet that you have knocked down there, or did we stop on anything short?
Gary Cleveland: Of course he talked about currency, night currency, and takeoff and landings for day and night. Spent some time on category, class, and type of aircraft.
Kenny Keller: Yes, and let me point out, because Gary brought that up just before we started, went live today. Gary brought that up, and I'm going to be transparent. I have always struggled with category, class, blah blah blah. In turn, I haven't been real strong with my students over the years with that, and examiners were always going to find your weak areas. They know what your weak areas are and in turn they're going to pick on your student there.
It's a to you instructors, figure out where your weak areas are and fix those problems. I just mentioned to Gary, I said, "You know what? I've always been weak on that, and I remember doing a presentation where I broke this down and tried to make a simple template for category and class to make it easy." I shot it, and I'm not sure if it's even in Ground School. I think it's lost on a hard drive.
It never got uploaded, so I need to see if I can find that, or we need to make a new one because I'm admitting my fault in not being strong, and it always comes out in the check ride. If I'm weak, my student's going to be weak, and the examiner, they'll find your student's weak spots. Always, it just never fails. That's why they're examiners, they're good at this stuff. That's a good point. What else? Anything else?
Gary Cleveland: I can't think of anything else except for every single thing we talked about, it's quite appropriate to be able to answer, "How would you teach that to somebody?"
Kenny Keller: Right. Okay. We were done for the day, it's like 5:30-6 o'clock, and he's like, "Hey, I'll just take you guys to the hotel if you want." Dropped us off, we went and got some supper and went to a local restaurant, had supper and had a good time just talking about everything. After we realized we weren't going home, and we were settled down, it was kind of a relief. I asked him, "Aren't you kind of relieved though? Yeah, we wish we were going home, but tomorrow all you got to do is go in and fly."
We got up early the next morning, we were downstairs, went for breakfast early. Our examiner's always early, he said, "I'll be here at five till eight." I told Gary, "Let's make sure we're ready before that because he's always early." 7:30 we're just finishing breakfast and he walks to pick us up, which is fine because we were done. He goes, "I know I'm early. It's okay." He sat down with us and shot the breeze for a little bit. Headed to the airport, you guys did a preflight, and then did the flight.
Just give us a breakdown of anything you could remember that you think will be relative to somebody wondering, "What's this going to be like? What's the examiner going to ask me? What's he going to have me do?" Just give them a brief overview of how it went.
Gary Cleveland: Okay.
Kenny Keller: How this examiner, how he went through the flying portion of the check ride.
Gary Cleveland: Well, of course you're going to fly from the instructor side, and he's just going to go right down the PTS for the maneuvers he wants to have you fly. He'll have you teach a couple of them.
Kenny Keller: I know I asked you, or you asked me on the startup since he's going to be, and this was the Enstrom, so PIC on the left. Gary said, "Well, the examiner will be on the left, I'll be on the right. How much is he going to want me to do?" I said, "You know, I'm not sure. You'll need to ask the examiner ahead of time and say, 'Hey, do you want me to sit on the right and reach over and do the startup, or have me teach you to startup?' You'll need to just ask him. Ask him, 'What do you want me to do?'" That's what you did, right?
Gary Cleveland: Yeah, and he basically had me do the startup, telling him when to hit the button.
Kenny Keller: Okay.
Gary Cleveland: Because obviously in the Enstrom the start button is on the collective for the PIC side. When I was ready for him to hit the starter button, I told him to hit the starter button, and then I pushed in the mixture control and it started. Right from there then, he just told me to start off with you'll be flying the maneuvers from the instructor side, just showing that you can fly the commercial standard from that side. Then when he was ready for me to actually instruct maneuvers, he made it clear. "Teach this, teach that."
Kenny Keller: Okay. Just roughly how many do you think, and maybe you already said this, I was daydreaming. How many actual maneuvers did you teach?
Gary Cleveland: He had me teach the pattern with a normal approach, he had me teach confined area, steep approach, and then he just had me talk about how I would transition somebody into a hover. Would you just give them all the controls? How would you get them to hover? What stages would you go through to get them there?
Kenny Keller: Okay. On the full down, did he have you do the full down during the straight in?
Gary Cleveland: Yes.
Kenny Keller: Okay, so he had the full down, the straight in, and then you also did a 180 but that was power recovery.
Gary Cleveland: Yes.
Kenny Keller: Was there anything that he did to surprise you? Since you've been through private, been through commercial, anything he did during that flight that surprised you, you weren't prepared for?
Gary Cleveland: No. I think I was prepared.
Kenny Keller: Okay. Any other questions over there, Steve?
Steve: No sir.
Kenny Keller: No? I'm surprised. All right. Well that's cool. Well, I know you got to get out of here and go pick up some kids. It's been a long day here, I'm getting tired after a big day of celebrating and partying. Thanks for the question that did come in, thanks for hopefully come of you that came back after the audio problem we had in the first one.
Be looking for more of this kind of stuff moving forward, again it's five year celebration today. Thank you to everybody, all the YouTube people that just watch our free videos. I know people go, "Hey Kenny," they send me a message on Facebook, "I'm not even your member and I passed my check ride using your free stuff." I have people going, "Now you should quit putting out so much free stuff," but that's part of what I do is just let people know what we're doing, what's going on, and that's why we share the things that we do to let you see what we're all about and the things that we do.
A lot more to come from us, five years we're just getting started. Thank you to everybody that watches the videos, gives us likes, gives us shares, brings in questions. Looks like we got a question coming in, we won't leave you quite yet. What do we got over there, Steve?
Steve: Rick again said, wait, hang on! Did he create distractions?
Gary Cleveland: Oh absolutely.
Kenny Keller: Good question, good question. Go ahead and tell us about what he did there.
Gary Cleveland: Well, he created distractions throughout the teaching process in the oral, and then by playing the student part for the first half of the lesson, he would-
Steve: During the flight he said, too.
Gary Cleveland: During the flight, absolutely. He would ask questions, "How would you teach this?" I don't remember the particular distractions that he provided, but he did. One distraction I guess I did, he pointed out I believe it was a coyote or a fox that was down near where we were going to do the confined, and there was some talk back and forth about it. What it wad doing there, if it had a den close by. Those are distractions, you can't just forget about flying, you still got to keep the altitude within 100 and keep your speed 60.
I recognized that as a distraction right off the bat. Whether it was intentional or not, I'm sure he saw it and paid note as to whether we kept the aircraft in good control during it.
Kenny Keller: Right. I think he's a pretty fair examiner, I don't think he would ever do anything that's dirty. Most examiners aren't, you can usually, I always tell students whether it's private, commercial, CFI, always watch them in their seat. I've had lots of people agree with me, if they're going to get ready to give you an engine failure, they're going to wiggle in their seat a little bit.
They don't just go, you're just riding along all of a sudden they go, "Engine failure!" Wham! When they start getting ready to give you an engine failure, you can tell because you'll see them wiggle a little bit, and tense up in the seat just a little. If you're comfortable in the aircraft, and you're being aware, you'll know when something's up when they're getting ready to pull something on you, whether it's an engine failure or they're getting ready to turn off the altimeter switch or if they're getting ready to give you a distraction.
If you're paying attention to the body language, you're going to catch. Not every time but you can, and I've had tons of people say, "Yes. The examiner wiggles in his seat before rolling the throttle off."
Gary Cleveland: I didn't pay that close of attention, but yeah, he's a very fair examiner and I felt good about the check ride.
Kenny Keller: Awesome. All right, well, be plenty more to come. Any other new questions Steve? All right, we're going to cut it off there so we can all go on about our day. Thanks for all the likes, shares, people that comment. Make sure you subscribe to the channel, I don't always ask people to do that, but subscribe so you'll be notified when we have new videos coming out.
We haven't done much in the last month getting ready for today, and getting ready for Heli Expo, but you could be sure we're going to be putting out a lot of stuff. I'm going to try to go live each day at Expo, take lots of pictures, take lots of video, and have lots to show you from Heli Expo.
Certified Flight Instructor Check Ride Debrief Gary Cleveland
PS: Gary now works full time at Helicopter Online Ground School!
Check us out on podomatic by clicking the blue button below! Learn on the go!
Helicopter Online Ground School was founded by Kenny Keller in 2012. He is the author of "Helicopter Check-Ride", which made Amazon #1 best seller upon release. His online video courses include Private Pilot, Commercial Pilot, Certified Flight Instructor, and Instrument Pilot. Kenny recognized a lack of quality ground training within the industry and has created a video learning platform to compliment any part 61 or 141 flight school program.
All four of these courses are FAA approved for WINGS and appear on the FAA safety website as approved online courses.
The Certified Flight Instructor membership includes access to all of the Private Pilot and Commercial Pilot videos as well, giving the Certified Flight Instructor membership over 40 hours of video to watch. The courses include information on all subject areas, to include the fundamentals of instructing.
Each course includes both practice written test questions and oral check ride questions.
Members have access to a closed Facebook group to network.
Kenny Keller shares his experience and knowledge with aspiring Student Pilots all over the World
Helicopter Online Ground School customer service is staffed Monday-Friday 8am-4pm for email, text, or calling.
Gary Cleveland, Chief Pilot
Helicopter Online Ground School
574-767-1797
