sweet truck man.

 

Some day!
Technically I fly primarily for the owner of the company. He's in his 70's, and owns a big farm near Bardstown. He had been driving out to Eastern KY a few times a week, 3-4 hour drive each direction. A lot of what I do is fly him back and forth. They currently have some 15 active mining sites, and I fly him, other foreman, and engineers around between them some days. Sometimes just to go check on operations, other times to look at potential land leases, so how the terrain lies, etc. Some days I fly him to meetings, other days I fly him to horse races all over the area (he has dozens of race horses).
Quite a few of the other coal companies have helicopters. Mostly the just the owners fly in them to check things out. It can take over 2 hours to fly from one coal mine to the next, where I can fly it straight line in 20 minutes.

 

nice, sounds like a kool job. i always thought it would be cool to learn to fly, but arnt flying lessons like 100 bux an hr if not higher?

 

Closer to $250/hr for helicopters, often more.

 

I'll stick to small planes...Helis are awesome, but not for me, harder to fly IMO

 

Very much. That's what I love about them!

 

Yeah, once we get back to the states and settled in, im going to go straight to the flight club on base and start my lessons.. The air force pays for all the ground school all i have to do is pay for flight time.. Which im sure is the expensive part lol..

But, i want to fly,, and the air force wont let me do it for them, so ill do it on my own, on their dime:_)

 

I will stick to my fixed wing, seems a little safer since I have yet to sprout wings...at least I can glide, lol.

 

Helicopters can glide too, it's called autorotation, look it up on youtube.
The downside is we don't glide as far. The upside is I can put it down in a backyard instead of using 1/2 mile of interstate or more.

Here, I can't figure out how to embed it again for whatever reason, but here is an R44 doing a touch down autorotation.
This is a landing without engine power, the engine is on but at idle, transmitting no power to the blades. The air moving UP through the rotor blades drive them forward, and you control the RPM but airspeed, pitch, collective pitch, and cyclic inputs. Close to the ground you flare, building rpm, losing airspeed and descent rate. As you are nearly stopped, you level out, and raise the collective using the stored RPM in the blades to cushion the landing.
YouTube - R-44 Full Down Auto

Also, while an airplane can glide only forward, I can autorotate forward, straight down, backwards, left or right, try that in a plane!

 

You may have a lot of options. I had a lot of students that were out of the military, getting partial reimbursement. Generally the student pays for 100% of the private rating, and then the government pays them back for 60% of the commercial rating (flight/ground/books) up to a certain percent. You need to do this at a part 141 VA approved school.

I had one student getting 100% paid for as voc rehab, but in my opinion he didn't deserve it. He threatened to sue because of racial discrimination, after he couldn't make it in the military flight program. He has some sort of PTS, and a lot of mental issues, tried to fight in the cockpit before, not good. After going through many other instructors, I was this close --><-- to having his medical pulled, but he stopped showing up for a while. Ugh. Worst student ever.

 

yeah, i cant wait to come back to the states and start looking into this.! I would LOVE to fly helo's ..My ULTIMATE goal is to be qual'd on both fixed wing and rotor. LOTS of money though lol

 

nice pics, did a search after seeing your avy with the topper, and lookin good all around .

 

i love your truck man!! looks great