Helicopter Pilot.

It’s done. I did it.

On Thursday May 9, 2019, I passed my ground and flight tests and got my Canadian commercial helicopter license.

It’s hard to know how best to process this.

On the one hand, getting my license was the inevitable outcome of a steady drumbeat of effort, focus, and expenditure that built to a crescendo this spring.

On the other, to get this far has been a perennial, lingering, and amorphous goal for almost ten years–and for much of that time, I had no clear path to victory, so it’s strange to think it’s finally done.

But I did it, and I’ll explain how it all came together. (I’ll also answer here for posterity a couple of questions I commonly get about the process, and about what comes next for the He-Dog Run.)

So, How did you finally get this done?

I’ve taken occasional helicopter lessons for almost ten years–some flights here and there, but no major progress, no nucleation, no self-sustaining growth.

I really started taking the process seriously last year, when I took three weeks and relocated to Abbotsford BC to give real, daily flight training a go.

Flying for 3+ hours every day is both good and bad–in one sense, it highlights at times how little progress you’re making day to day and lesson to lesson. (The stagnation is real.) But on the other hand, you don’t have time to stew about it–you just get back up and fly more, and stepping back to consider a week at a time, you of course see major improvements. (The stagnation is, it turns out, not real.) I went from zero to solo in twelve days. (Described in last year’s post.)

In a perfect world, I’d have just stayed on in BC to do the four months full-time that the Canadian commercial license generally requires. But my job didn’t come close to cooperating. Starting last July I was neck-deep in a particularly challenging legal case, and logging record-high billable hours (and record-low flight hours). I had no time to do anything, especially traveling to Canada to fly–even for a day or two. So there wasn’t much to do except put my head down and focus on the case, thinking that maybe by late February I could sneak up for a couple more weeks of training. (Of course, a couple more weeks might do little more than get me back to where I’d been last July. Again, the path to victory was far from clear.)

But then all of a sudden we won that particularly challenging case, and by the start of February I suddenly found myself with a bit more time on my hands. I still couldn’t commit to anywhere near full-time flying, but I resolved to at least hop up to BC whenever I could. There would be no holidays, no days off–any day I wasn’t tied up with something else I’d be up there, flying.

I started out back in the Bell 47, but soon decided to switch to the Robinson R44 (more on this later).

As spring wore on, I transitioned to the new R44, flew it solo as well, and the very next day went off for a nearly 2 hour “nav solo” through the mountains.

With these milestones out of the way, it was time to focus on the endgame. With each successive flight I chipped away more and more at the emergencies and flight exercises eventually required on the flight test.

These became not just things I’d have to master later, but things I’d better work on now.

I also needed to take the Transport Canada Commercial Helicopter (CPHEL) written exam. This proved more of an issue than I expected. I was never consistently based in Abbotsford—even at the best of times, I came and went—so I couldn’t take all the ground school classes I needed at Chinook (I’d miss too many). That meant I had to take an online ground school, which sounded fine until I realized the particular one I chose was extraordinarily involved (probably 100+ hours of mandatory videos, literally hundreds of quizzes, practice tests that I needed to pass, etc.). I had initially put it off, thinking I could knock out ground school in a week or two. I was wrong. Plowing through this material took a massive amount of every-waking-non-working-hour effort, and I wound up with a 170-page tightly-handwritten notebook full of The Knowledge. (Turns out, the online course I did is much, much more detailed than it needs to be–I didn’t end up needing 90% of that material for the exam.) I then had to schedule the actual test with Transport Canada, which is an adventure in itself (Tracy at Chinook moved some mountains) and on April 25, I passed it. (I scored in the high 90s where 60 is a pass, serving mainly to evidence the almost foolish amount of over-preparation inherent in the online course.)

With the written test out of the way, I was in the home stretch. I booked a week to come up and fly twice per day, just hammering on practice flight test maneuvers. Gone were the days of “cool flights,” skimming mountaintops and landing on bridges. No, this was a $3000-a-pop version of Groundhog Day: The same flight day in and day out, over and over, practicing maneuvers and ironing out kinks. May 9 rolled around, and I was signed off for the real deal: a flight test in the Robinson R44.

What does the actual test entail?

The written test is 3.5 hours, 100 questions. You typically take it a couple weeks before your flight test. It covers a host of topics, from aerodynamics, air law and regulations, and meterology, to cross country planning, general aviation knowledge, airspace, procedures, and regulations.

The flight test basically takes all afternoon, and involves a couple hours of oral exam followed by a practical test. For the oral (or “ground”) portion, I was given a trip to plan, with passengers and cargo to pick up, and places they wanted to go; I had to plan the route, run weight and balance and fuel calculations, and answer lots of freeform questions about everything from the route I chose, to terrain features, airspace boundaries, frequencies, the meaning of various things on the charts, and general questions about the aircraft, aerodynamics, aviation laws and regulations, and emergencies.

Once I finished the oral portion, I did a detailed walk-around inspection of the helicopter (combined with a healthy game of “name that part,” and “what happens if this here fails”), a preflight safety briefing, and then it was off to the races. The commercial pilot flight test has a few dozen scored categories, many of which are various maneuvers you need to do. You’ll do four engine failures–one from a hover, one sprung on you at some point, and two autorotation exercises (one straight-in, and one 180-degree). You’ll do a confined area approach and landing, off-level landings, steep turns, instrument flight, recovery from unusual attitudes, a rejected departure, and you’ll also be given three emergencies, which can be anything from hydraulic failure to governor failure to stuck pedals and so on. As my instructor Ray said as we began those days of endless flight test prep: “You’ll find that a lot of stuff will start going wrong on this machine, starting today.” As long as you pass the overall score–and perhaps more challenging, don’t fail even one maneuver–you pass the test. I did.

Why Chinook, and why Canada?

Good question. I’ll bullet it out.

Well-known school. Chinook has trained a quarter of all working helicopter pilots in Canada. They’ve been around since the early 80s, and have a big fleet of aircraft (Bell 47s, Robinson R44s, and Bell 206s) and a deep bench of instructors.
Instructors. Not one of Chinook’s instructors is “school-to-seat.” To a person, they all have many years – often many decades – of real-world experience flying every imaginable mission, from logging to firefighting and everything in between. In the US, it’s common to see newly minted pilots grab an instructor rating and teach to build their hours. In Canada it just doesn’t work that way. My own instructor, Ray, has worked decades as a commercial pilot, and was actually head of a major helicopter operator before he decided to teach flying. He’s spent his entire life in the industry – and the depth and breadth of his experience reflects this.
Flexibility. There are other good schools, including some near me in California—but they’re typically smaller, and can’t adjust as easily to the apparent whims of my work schedule. If I suddenly have a week available, I want to fly for 3-4 hours a day–or just as suddenly I may have to cancel for work. Small schools (understandably) struggle with that uncertainty; even if I had a week off, they’d already be mostly booked. There’s only so much you can ever fly when the school has one aircraft and more than one student. Chinook probably doesn’t love my schedule either (thanks Tracy!), but they have been exceptionally accommodating: I was always able to fly whenever I had time.
Location. The Fraser River valley in British Columbia has probably some of the best terrain anywhere in the world for helicopter training. Pilots from the US military come up here to do mountain flying courses. The Abbotsford airport itself is a surprisingly busy Class C control zone (as high as they go in Canada), and with commercial jet traffic, airplane and helicopter flight training, general aviation, and firefighting all going on, it can be hard to get a word in edgewise. Useful for later.
Direct to Commercial. Transport Canada lets helicopter students go straight to commercial, without doing the private pilot certification in between. Practically this doesn’t save much time or money (as the test standards are still higher), but it means that right from day one they’re training to a higher standard with the aim of turning out professional pilots. Might as well learn it right the first time! And with 150 hours and a night rating, you can get FAA equivalence. (Up next.)

How much did it cost?

Ah, the money question. It’s not cheap. So far it’s been $87,000, not counting the model I commissioned of C-FISG – the Bell 47 I soloed in. And, come to think of it, not counting any of the travel costs or any other ancillaries. That’s just for flight time. I’m now at 124 hours, some in the cheaper Bell 47, a few flights in the (expensive) Bell 206, and a big slug of it in the Robinson R44.

Why the R44 switch?

When I first started, Ray said the best idea is to train in what you’re actually going to fly. While I can’t predict the future, the Robinson R44 is by far the most popular “starter” helicopter (and helicopter for private owners), and it’s almost de rigeur to start with one if you’re owning your own. The Bell 47 is awesome and historic, but no one really flies them anymore. The R44 cost more per hour, but I reasoned it was wise to start building time early in a ship I would actually be most likely to fly when finished. Add to this the fact that I’d taken a forced 8-month hiatus from flying, and I would have spent hours getting back up to speed in the 47 — might as well take those to just get up to speed in the 44.

In the end, did it go how you expected?

Yes and no. When I dreamed of being a helicopter pilot, it was always about me — me flying around, me taking people places, whatever. I didn’t (and couldn’t, really) predict meeting so many awesome people at the school, or that Chinook would become almost a second home. It’s sort of like deciding where to go to college: You base that decision on the information available to you at the time, but looking back, it’s most shaped by the people with whom you spent those years–something of course you could never predict in advance.

I also think I subconsciously assumed that when I had my helicopter license I would be “done”–that is, a licensed pilot who could fly perfectly and learn no more. It pretty much goes without saying that this is not the case. Yes, I passed the test–but there are plenty of things I want to get even better at, and plenty of things my instructors can do that I wouldn’t even attempt at the moment.

It also took more work than I thought. While I’m loath to admit it, if you’d asked me a couple years ago how I’d actually get my license, I probably would have said it would just sort of happen. Well, it didn’t. It took some serious one-track focus for quite a while. I learned that you can defer it for as long as you like, but eventually you’ll have to commit to that level to get it done. (Especially if, like me, you’re working a “real job” alongside).

What happens next? Are you doing the He-Dog Run now?

Heck no. It’s still a long way off – in reality, maybe even further off now I actually have some sense what will be required. But I took the first and most major step toward it. Buying a helicopter is some ways off as well, to put it mildly. So my immediate plan is to keep going–to keep flying with Chinook when I can, and to keep working on additional ratings and qualifications. Next up is my night rating (something that doesn’t even exist in the US), followed by an application for my FAA commercial license. I’ll also do a Bell 206 type rating, and maybe Bell 505 and MD500 ratings as well. I’d also like to do the legendary helicopter mountain course, which is apparently one of the most challenging there is (and is taught at Chinook by my own instructor, Ray). I’ll try a night-vision goggles class, and I’ll aim to get out to Survival Systems in Connecticut again for a refresher of my HUET underwater egress training. I’ve also ordered a helicopter helmet (an MSA Gallet LH250 from Merit), which arrives this week. Most of all, I’ll keep learning and keep flying, and just enjoy the fact that for the first time in my life, I’m actually a licensed helicopter pilot. Time to let that one sink in!

And time to celebrate with a post-license flight video. Now there’s that legendary scenery!