Warning Obtaining your Helicopter Licence in the USA

[Ultima535]

Due to a recent bad experience I would suggest that anybody thinking of obtaining their licence in America should not only thoroughly check out the school but try and obtain as many references from previous students as possible not sure how that would be done though, maybe through a site like this or contact other schools for a comparison, I didn't as I took their word, ( silly me )
Once you have gone to the great expense of all the paperwork finger print checks etc, choosing your school and which helo you intend to learn on this has to be entered on all the paperwork and has to be adhered to, paid your deposit to the school for them to finish the necessary paperwork, they then have you by the balls. You arrive at the school and find out there is a 20 minute flight to the practice area and 20 mins back, leaving little time for necessary manoevers like hovering transitions in and out quick stops autos etc and when you get the invoice they have added on a fuel surcharge and cost for pre flighting the machine, the fuel surcharge was mentioned if fuel cost increased but In fact has gone down in the past 8 months so shouldn't even apply, you also need to check the actual engine/flying time. I feel the school I attended ripped me off and once you are there they have you completely at their mercy so my advice choose the school then thoroughly check them out and get references that you can contact.
Eventually I attended another school who were very surprised at the extras their practice area was the other side of the airfield 5 mins away and $150 cheaper so all worked out in the end, thanks for nothing Group 3 Van Neuys

[Gordy]

So you are saying that you did NOT check all that stuff out before deciding to spend $80,000????

Just looking at the chart or even google earth you can see that you would have to fly a few miles to get to un-congested areas.

Group 3 has been at Van Nuys many years and I have never heard any complaints. They are not generally known as one of the big "international" schools, and do not train for the CAA or EASA standards.

[EddieHeli]

Surely a 20 minute flight to the practice area and back, 10 minutes each way is valuable flying experience anyway. Learning at an international airport, I was sometimes holding that long waiting to cross the runway to the hover square on the other side of the airfield.

[Ultima535]

Gordy yes did all my checks even called them from the UK you should thoroughly read the thread regarding the extras after I started the training CAA is the UK rating I went for my FAA and yes since I have made other enquiries regarding an alternative school I have heard complaints regarding that school and their add ons.
EddieHeli again you should read thoroughly its 20 mins there, 20 mins back that's 40 MINS out of your flying time NOT 20 yes it's valuable flying time but any novice can fly straight and level keeping within the parameters may be a bit more challenging not had an issue crossing the runway yet

[Hughes500]

Should have stayed in the UK, probably cheaper now considering the exchange rate ! Seeing as most schools are based on airfields better value for money !

[Gordy]

Ultima535
Gordy yes did all my checks even called them from the UK you should thoroughly read the thread regarding the extras after I started the training CAA is the UK rating I went for my FAA and yes since I have made other enquiries regarding an alternative school I have heard complaints regarding that school and their add ons.
EddieHeli again you should read thoroughly its 20 mins there, 20 mins back that's 40 MINS out of your flying time NOT 20 yes it's valuable flying time but any novice can fly straight and level keeping within the parameters may be a bit more challenging not had an issue crossing the runway yet

Would love to read your "thread"... But you only have 2 post as of right now---so where is it?

Yes I know CAA is the UK rating. I was a UK citizen in a former life, many, many years ago. (Although I was not born there).

20 minutes is a slight exaggeration to the training areas North and West of KVNY. Yes I fly out of there frequently---I was just there 3 days ago test flying and picking up a 407 from RSI.

I do accept that there is a cost associated with flying out of VNY as a student, because of the flight time to "training areas", but it is no secret. Like others have mentioned, that ferry time is also valuable. A portion of commercial training is straight "hours building". By factoring this extra flight time as part of your "hours building", it does not seem so bad.

Caveat, FWIW, I am NOT associated with anyone at Group 3, however, I have hired some of their graduates in the past, of which one of them still instructs there on an occasional basis.

[SASless]

The transit time can be useful for more than just straight and level flying.

One thing it does is allow some time for the Student to settle down and relax a bit.

Add in some turns, climbs, descents, decels, accels, perhaps even a bit of Hood flight.

Block the pedals on Take Off and fly with some yaw issues and introduce effect of Torque/Rotor RPM changes.

It does not have to be a waste of time.

[herman the crab]

So did you get your license?

Did you ask about the fuel surcharge and why it was applied?

Charges for pre-flight? Why are they charging you for something that YOU should have done? Unless they are classing the (dual) time pre-flighting as ground school - most schools charge for ground school.

Flight time v engine time? You might want to read the FARs..

HTC

PS I have no association with them either.

[rotornut]

At the Canadian school where I got my license there was a 20 second hover taxi to the practice area. Good school and great instructors. Too bad it's closed now.

[havick]

Cloud9 in palm beach Florida are very transparent and won't rip you off.

[al_renko]

Go to South Africa and stop all the fannying around.

[paco]

LR helicopters in Calgary are also worth a try.

Phil

[Kelly Hopper]

I studied for my PPL licence 33 years ago and in those days the then new Robinson R22 was available for training in Canada at around 65 quid/hr! USA prices were a little higher but not by much. The magnet was drawing me there purely on hourly cost, but hating the look of this new fangled toy helicopter I decided to do some sums elsewhere. Additionally I wanted a CAA licence not FAA.
I ended up flying a proper machine (Enstrom), with the best instruction anywhere, here in UK which was a very wise decision.
Completed on minimum hours,paid 10 hours up front to get 5% off, reclaimed the 12.5% VAT (different times), and with the money I had saved not flying across the atlantic and living costs overseas for weeks/months I reckon I had actually saved a few quid?
You need to put much more in the equation than just hourly flying cost. It's like Ryanair. 20 quid for a flight but by the time you have flown from the wrong airport, paid for bags, cc fee, boarding card,sandwich, and their bus to take you the 2 hours into town because you landed at the wrong airport it was cheaper to go BA!

[RMK]

I did a stand-alone FAA PPL(H) back in 2006. At that point it was roughly USD 15K in US or GBP 15K in UK (USD:GBP was around 1.75) so was a great deal on US training.

Back in the UK, I had no problems doing SFH on my FAA ticket while taking a few months to do the JAA exams and the required 5hrs instrument awareness flight training for my JAA check ride.

I did my FAA PPL in KISM, Florida (the company no longer exists), but did my R44 conversion in West Palm Beach - so would also recommend Cloud9 as noted in a post above.

[muermel]

I can recommend Atlantic Helicopters in Fort Pierce (KFPR) from personal experience last autumn, have nothing but good things to say about the training there. :ok:

The instructor is a very experienced UK-FIH & FE so you can do an EASA PPL-H there. They also can provide FAA training. They operate 2 R22 and an R44 Raven 2.

[Paul Cantrell]

Gordy says: I do accept that there is a cost associated with flying out of VNY as a student, because of the flight time to "training areas", but it is no secret. Like others have mentioned, that ferry time is also valuable. A portion of commercial training is straight "hours building". By factoring this extra flight time as part of your "hours building", it does not seem so bad.


Gordy, I respectfully disagree about the time building statement. If the school is doing the commercial correctly there shouldn't be any "hour building". First of all, I'm assuming this is a non-rated pilot, i.e. starting from scratch.

Figure 65 hours to get the private (that's pretty typical of ab-initio students) Of that 10-15 is PIC (i.e. solo) Cross Country (so it counts toward the commercial requirements).

Then figure 40 hours of instrument flying, all of which gets logged as PIC and Cross Country (under the hood) towards the commercial requirement.

That leaves 50 hours to get the commercial.

In my experience, there's no extra there. It takes the full 50 hours to get a new private pilot flying to commercial standards (but the instrument rating helps quite a bit there). If you are having to hour build to reach the required 100 hours PIC time, you're not getting all the training you should be getting.

Smart people get their instructor rating (CFI & CFII) during the same 50 hours they are working on their commercial (just fly the commercial training flights from the instructor seat, explaining the maneuvers). During my commercial training nobody told me I could do that - it was only later that I realized I could have saved some money that way.

If you have to fly 10 minutes each way to the practice area, assuming the above is about 100 lessons, that would consume 33 hours out of your training time! More than that (as described by Ultima 535) is crazy! Granted you can do some things along the way that would be useful (like, some forced landings along the way) but still, that's a lot of mainly straight and level flight...

It's bad enough that you burn about 10 minutes on each flight doing startup and shutdown, adding 20-40 minutes per flight to essentially reposition the aircraft is really a burden on the student. Not only that, but in a situation like that you end up wanting to fly a longer lesson (or an even higher percentage of flight time ends up being repositions). But in my experience past about 1.2 hours students start to fade quickly, and they end up flying but not learning much (because their brain is baked by then). So, why on earth would you want to learn at a school that eats so many training hours to get to/from the practice area? Why not go to a school where the training area is right at the airport (I'll skip plugging my own school, but a school like Northeast Helicopters which is out in cow country would be an example).

We teach at a busy controlled field (not nearly as busy as KVNY but pretty busy) but we have a dedicated taxiway for helicopter training so typically we're there in about a 30 second air taxi. Tower is very good about working with us to minimize delays - they seldom hold us for more than 60 seconds even when it's very busy. We have lots of farmland within 5 minutes of our airport (even though we're just outside Boston) so there's no problem getting out to areas similar to Simi Valley, i.e. open enough to be landing off airport, forced landing practice, etc, but 75% of our flights are right at the airport so there's no time lost going back and forth to a training area. That's been the case at the 4 airports I've taught at over the years - we always have some dedicated airspace at the airport so that we can fly unhindered by other traffic.

But Ultima 535 also brings up the good point that what has changed in recent years is TSA approval/visas that make it much more difficult to change schools for any foreign pilots training here, if it turns out you've been hoodwinked. And, I have to say, I always warn people that flight training is full of flight schools willing to take advantage of students, and helicopter schools even more so.

For the amount of money you're going to invest in private+commercial in the USA it probably makes some sense to visit the school before you go through the whole visa thing. Yes, it'll cost you 2-3 thousand dollars in airfare and hotels, but it's probably money well spent - especially if you can visit 2-3 candidate schools and maybe get some assurances in writing about rates (and, to Ultima 535's point, no secret charges).

BTW, I'll warn all potential students: never EVER give any aviation school large sums of money up front. Silver State was a great example of why not, but there's tons of shady schools out there, and you will never know it until they close their doors and tell you that your money is gone. So, even if they promise you a better rate if you put down large sums of money, don't do it. I would suggest never putting more than $3-5,000 down at a time, i.e. no more than you can afford to lose.

I wouldn't want people overseas to think that you're going to necessarily get ripped off training in the USA. There are lots of great schools here, with great reputations. Still, it makes sense to ask lots of questions and always to talk to a few recent graduates of a school before you commit to going there, and definitely ask about hidden fees and overhead like having to fly away from the airport to get to a training area.

[Hughes500]

Hu 269

Sorry to hear that as they put a cloud over the rest of us honest people here in the UK, well i suppose you could change your name to Cabri ?

[Gordy]

Paul,

I still stand by my claim that the flight time to and from a training area can be useful. Especially in the early stages of learning.

As you said, a student is starting to fade at the 1.2 mark---this is actually earlier, more like 50-55 minutes of straight hard core learning. Way back when I was instructing, I used the short ferry times to slowly build up tthe lesson intensity, then about 50 minutes of solid learning followed by a gradual wind down on the ferry back for total lesson of 1.2 or 1.3.

THere is lots of stuff you can teach during the ferry, most of it airmanship--all that stuff that does not really fit into a stand alone lesson.

We always used to teach the CFI portion prior to the commercial checkride and utilize those hours---in fact, I rarely taught people commercial maneuvers except right before their checkride----they would be teaching me, right after they got their ppl or instrument.

As you say---choose your school wisely. At one of the supposed front runners in the US it would take an average of 7 minutes from the time you called for taxi to a pad to the time one got airborne. (I sat and timed it for two days a few years back).