Matt Johnson heads up a weather training program for Metro Aviation. He is a Gold Seal FAA Flight Instructor and Examiner. Have you applied the idea of situational awareness to weather before? Knowing what the weather was doing, what the weather is now and what it will be in the future. With access to the right weather products and knowing more about how they are developed you can level up your pre-flight weather assessment.  Weather is a contributing factor to a significant number of helicopter accidents. It is easy to see why looking at the photo below – even without considering flying ..read more

Dan Parsons is Senior Standards Officer (Aerodromes & Heliports) where he tackles airport safety and regulatory issues all day long. You have probably seen the video clip on social media multiple times – a OH-58 comes into land and as it touches down the blades contact another helicopter ground running beside it. Both aircraft are destroyed in spectacular manner but luckily there is no loss of life. In this episode we give a lot more context than you get from the seconds long clip.  There are a handful of helicopter videos that get recycled frequently on social media groups – yes we h ..read more

Now a helicopter instructor in the UAE, Clive Richardson flew Apaches in the British Army and was part of the Blue Eagles helicopter display team. As aircrew we spend a huge amount of time training for different circumstances and emergencies. Dealing with a burning flare in your cockpit fired from a wingman’s aircraft is not one of these circumstances!! Add in the complications of being a few thousand feet in the air, over hostile controlled land and in a sealed Apache cockpit with your own personal weapon ammunition at risk of cooking off and you have a fun time ahead of you.  This is th ..read more

Outside of the ATSB, Rob is a Technical Councillor and Safety Officer for the Sport Aircraft Association of Australia (SAAA), is currently building an experimental kitplane (‘Van’s RV8’), and is the Deputy Wing Aviation Safety Officer with the Australian Air Force Cadets. Halfway through 2021, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) put out a call for assistance for information from the aviation community. What they are looking for is feedback or more information about any ground handling incidents on Robinson type helicopters, especially focused on the aft tail cone bulkhead or tail rot ..read more

Sam Chisholm grew up on cattle properties and got into helicopter flying early. He has spent the last 16 years flying and mustering in rural Australia. Cattle are big business in Australia. Rough round numbers has us at 25 million head of cattle and the industry employs somewhere around 200,000 people. Australia is the 3rd largest beef exporter in the world. The cattle industry also contributes a sizable chunk of the annual helicopter hours flown in Australia.  One set of figures I had from 2004 was that 62% of all Robinson R22 flight hours in Australia were conducted in aerial muste ..read more

Miles Dunagan is the President of the National EMS Pilots Association (USA) with a goal of promoting safety in the industry. Chatter in the cabin starts to die down, you have reduced power and started to bleed back the airspeed. Outside your world is starting to shrink as the conditions start to deteriorate. You lean forward in your seat to try and see a little further ahead. The VSI is showing a descent as you keep visual contact with the ground. What do you do next?   Enroute Decision Point is a tool that you can use to shift your mindset into a deliberate decision making mode when ..read more

Chris Ryan is the owner of Ryan Aerospace – a company building virtual reality flight simulators that are changing the way pilots train. How would you like to have been holding a steady hover and taking off and landing at 3 hours of helicopter flight time? Chris Ryan couldn’t afford helicopter lessons so he built himself a simulator to practice at home. His instructor was so impressed at his progress that he encouraged Chris to turn the simulator into a business.  From a humble PVC pipe contraption to now selling hundreds of virtual reality helicopter flight simulators into the military m ..read more

Richard Mornington-Sandford – flight instructor and engineering trainer has a long history working with the Robinson brand. Before this episode if you told me that there was more than an hour conversation that you could get out of talking about the governor in Robinson type helicopters I would have been dubious. I was wrong! Today we have back on the show pilot and engineer Richard Mornington-Sanford. Richard Mornington-Sanford was an engineer in the RAF before branching out into the roles of a civilian flight instructor, licensed helicopter engineer and air accident investigator. A photo on h ..read more

Jacob has a busy schedule as an Apache instructor and standards officer but has been chipping away at videos on YouTube for some time. If the images and text on the page of your aerodynamic textbook are starting to blur together then it might be time to take a break and try to ingest the information using another format. Jacob from the YouTube channel Helicopter Lessons in 10 Minutes or Less is an Apache instructor and standards officer who has a great ability to simplify and layout out aerodynamic topics in his videos.   I conducted a number of job interviews for pilots positions wh ..read more

Mark Watterson specialises in helicopter air-to-air photography and is based in South East Queensland. Helicopters make fantastic photo subjects! There is still something special about flying that captures the human spirit and the intrinsic movement and energy in a helicopter especially so. Mark Watterson has been photographing helicopters professionally since 2014. He shares some tips for how best to work with aerial photographers for a great product.  Mark has kindly provided the photos you see in this blog post. They provide some great inspiration if you are looking to stage and captur ..read more