Part 2 KK's Helicopter Training Notebook
Oct 15, 2018
Gary Cleveland: I used your information and your knowledge and your aircraft and here I am today as a Certified Flight Instructor and I still enjoy it so I have Kenny to thank for it all.
Kenny Keller: We're thrilled to have him and I want to do something else before we get started with the privileges and limitations. I have my Helicopter Training Notebook that I made all those years ago. It's how I got through my ratings, I've used it as an instructor, and just through a weird way, I started using it to train as an instructor.
When I failed my first check ride, I was overwhelmed so I created this notebook before I went back to re-test and I had it on Amazon for a while and I took it down after somebody made a rude comment, and he made a comment because the book I put it out there with, in pretty much its original form, it's a study guide, it's not a certified training manual.
These are just my personal notes, but people wanted a copy of it. I put a large transcription at the end with a guy named Lorenzo, who was, we were very proud of, one of our students that used our training built off that original PowerPoint, that's built off my notebook that we just talked about and I had it set at the minimum price on Amazon. The minimum price was the minimum price, I couldn't make it any lower but by the size of the book, it made it around 40 bucks. I had some really good reviews but then some guy gets on there and says, "This wasn't worth $10 blah, blah, blah." You know, I put a disclaimer in the beginning, "Hey, this is not a training manual. This is just for those of you that want the notebook."
Part 2 KK's Helicopter Training Notebook
I took them down because I was aggravated. Well, since then, I've rejuvenated three versions of that original notebook and I'm pretty proud of it and I took out that testimonial and that testimonial is going to go in another book because we're really proud of Lorenzo. It's a great story, so that transcription will be moved to another book. It's not going away forever but I did it to trim down my notebook so I could get the price down a little bit. I also redesigned all three covers to give it more meaning for us here at Helicopter Online Ground School.
They were generic covers three years ago when I launched them, and I want to show Gary something here he hasn't seen yet, that he doesn't really know about. He's been gone for two weeks and I did this while he was gone so, I just cut the tape on it. I didn't let him open up and let him see it, but he gets to see it now for the first time.
All right, so there you go. Take a peek at that, Gary. Show it to the camera. Maybe we could try to zoom in or have Steve give it a try to zoom it. If it doesn't, let's let Steve zoom in there just for a minute and I'll give you the story while he's zooming in.
This is Gary Cleveland in our November 96, or 8626 papa, the helicopter we love. Dr. Nick, my good friend of ours, lets us use it through the wintertime and spring while he's busy. We're lucky enough to still have it this year because he's super busy. It's getting ready to go home shortly for an annual inspection so Nick can fly it a little bit but Gary has enjoyed flying it, we love this aircraft.
Gary gets to keep that, so that book now on Amazon's around 25 bucks so it's at the minimum price. I could make it cheaper if I took the color out of it but you know what, I left the color in there because there's some areas I just wanted to highlight and I thought, "You know what, I'm going to cheapen it up a little bit but I'm not cheapening it up any more than that." It's around 25 to 27 depending on which one you're interested in, but I have members asking. We just had Roland and Austin here doing their commercial check rides last month and they've used Ground School videos, they studied all the manuals, far aim, rotor craft flying handbooks, so on and so forth.
Part 2 KK's Helicopter Training Notebook
Those two, along with some others said, "Hey Kenny, I want to get a copy of your notebook." They asked after the last couple days they were just fine-tuning everything and I said, "You know what guys, here, why don't you take a look at my notebook," and they looked at it like, "Oh man," and I said, "You can take this to the hotel with you but you have to bring it back because I don't give away my original notebook," I let them have my last copy from Amazon so I'm like, "You can't go home and take this with you and not give it back because it's my last copy".
They came back after using it and they're like, "Can we buy one of those?" And I'm like, "I don't have them available. They're no longer available." Those two, along with others that have asked, they're like, "Hey Kenny, can I get a copy of that?" You know what, the PDF copy goes to our Ground School members for free so if you're a Helicopter Online Ground School member you can have this free as a PDF file to use electronically, but I reintroduced it for people that want it, our Ground School members that have asked for it to come back, so if you do get it and you give me a crappy Amazon review, then just be a jerk like that, you know?
Part 2 KK's Helicopter Training Notebook
He started with nothing, bought my training, made it to double I in six months and flew in Tennessee. I got to fly with Travis. He took me up and flew me around the Tennessee mountains, which was fricking awesome. Then, Travis has moved on to an EMS career and he calls me occasionally, you know, and I'm very proud of Travis. He's another one of our good success stories and I thought, "You know, that's a little more appropriate for the cover of that book."
Our new, How to Build Your Online Business, that's available too, so I'm really proud of my author page now where before, I'd had problems and I had something that was misspelled and because I took them off of Amazon, even though they're unavailable, you still see them. So it's like, unavailable, unavailable, one was called said, diary, I don't know why that was, so I cleaned them up, revamped them, got better covers on them, cut it down to make it affordable, so those are out there now and you can find any of those at my Amazon author page, Amazon.com/author/KennyKeller. I'm going to plug it because I'm proud of them.
Kenny Keller: I want to mention that as soon as Gary's here full time, on a daily basis, that's one of Gary's projects. I'm going to have him go through and any reg that's changed, like I just saw they're getting ready to do away with F, Area Forecast, FA, and it's going to become GMF or something, they're going to change it so there's still some things in here that probably need changed like maybe Flight Watch went away, that might still be in here so I'm going to have Gary go through all three versions of the notebook and find anything that we think needs to be updated, add anything that we'd like to add.
We want to put some more personal stuff about the different aircraft, like the Enstrom, the R-22 and R-44, all of us here fly them, me, Chris, and Gary. We fly all of these aircraft, we have experience in them and I want to get together with these two and put our personal experiences in the book with the aircraft.
Right now we have notes to help you learn about those aircraft, but I'd like to put in for the Enstrom example, you know one of the best auto-rotating helicopters out there and my experience with them over the years and even though an Enstrom almost killed me in a ground residence accident, over a freak thing, later I still end up owning one and how I still think it's a great aircraft even though one of them tried to kill me.
Part 2 KK's Helicopter Training Notebook
I want to put some personal touches, just things you need to know about flying an Enstrom, how if you're going to transition from the R-22 to the Enstrom, you're going to love it. It's such an easy transition. If you train on the R-22 you'll be able to go out in the world and fly anything. Those little bits and pieces I want to add to those books.
You can always go to Amazon and type Kenny Keller in there and I'm sure you'll find your way to the page but pretty proud of the books. More to come. I won't spend any more time on that because there's going to be other projects, other books, going to keep building, making better, bigger, better, faster.
Part 2 KK's Helicopter Training Notebook
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