#16 Helicopter Hovering Best Tip To Hone Your Skills
Mar 04, 2019Helicopter Hovering Best Tip To Hone Your Skills
The Hovering Square Pattern! This is a great way to practice for helicopter students and hone your hovering skills!
I'm Kenny Keller, creator of Helicopter Online Ground School. We've been doing daily videos, and people have been emailing me. They've been digging it, liking it. So, each day I'm hitting a topic. Things that can help you in your training.
The hovering square pattern, whether you're brand new or a rusty pilot brushing up your skills, this is one of my favorite absolute techniques to build your skills. And what's fun with a new student when you do this, I don't do it every time, but you do it maybe once a week and then they see their progress building. It gives them confidence. So what I do, luckily I was taught this many years ago, we're going to use Plymouth Airport as an example where we do it. There's squares in the concrete where they're cut. You can see them and actually put tape on them, so the student knows exactly where the squares are.
And we simply start by doing, pick a square, pick it up, do a nice, smooth hover taxi over to the first spot, set it down, pick it up, clear the tail, move over to the next spot, set it down. Pick it up again. As you're doing this, you're getting experience in all directions.
#16 Helicopter Hovering Best Tip To Hone Your Skills
Now, I wouldn't do it on a high wind day. I would do on more of a day with some wind so that you're getting practice with every wind direction. If it was really windy, I wouldn't do it. And yes, we normally practice pickups and set downs into the wind, but this is really good for your skills. Then pick it up, do a turn, whichever way you prefer, or method you use in the aircraft you're flying, back around, set down. Each one, pick it up.
And the beauty of this is, as simple as it is, everybody I've showed, absolutely loves it. And again, you're getting picking up, setting down, turns, hovering practice, you're getting a little bit of everything. So for an example with a new student, what's fun is, I show it to them early on and explain to them, "look, you're just learning to hover, so this isn't going to be pretty."
And they'll be all over the place. And it'll be really messy. But then, as they make progress, you show them a week later, a month later, and they see their skills improve. They get really excited, and then they're like, "Oh, my God, thank you. Thank you for showing me that." I use it, I like to use it when I haven't flown in a little while and when I'm brushing up my skills, I use this.
So, if you have any tips for learning to hover, anything along these lines or anything else, ground or flying wise, put them in the comments below. We'd like to hear your tips and tricks. Hovering is a big one, right? Everybody struggles with hovering. This is one that I like to cover. So again, if you want to see me doing this in the aircraft, I'll put that link down below the video.
It's an older video, but it's still pretty good. You can go view that. I want to talk about our memberships real fast. We have private, commercial, CFI, instrument. You can go monthly, or you can go professional pilot, where you get them all. That's unlimited. The monthly you need to know that you get 24-hour trial on any of the memberships. Enter your credit card, you have 24 hours to view all the training. Remove your credit card before the end of the 24 hours, you'll be billed nothing if you decide it's not right for you. Keep the training as long as you like. Cancel any time.
#16 Helicopter Hovering Best Tip To Hone Your Skills
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#16 Helicopter Hovering Best Tip To Hone Your Skills
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