Small Unmanned Aircraft Loading Example

                                All right, Kenny with www.RemotePilotOnline.com, back with you. And I want to just do an impromptu video here. I just got done editing the three videos by G Pilot, Gary Cleveland, that they did on the weight and balance and unmanned aircraft loading. Three great videos, he's given you the meat of what you need to know and what the FAA wants you to know.

                                I'm going to give you a little bit of real world here and make fun of myself a little bit here to show you why all the things that Gary just told you, why they're really important. And just to give you a little background, in helicopters, we do weight and balance, we do it all the time, and it makes sense. Everything that Gary just talked about is the same in a helicopter.

Small Unmanned Aircraft Loading

                                The helicopter's built so it spins from a certain point. You add weight, you burn off fuel, weight and balance changes and you could put the aircraft in a dangerous position if you're out of weight and balance. The same thing happens in unmanned aircraft. I'm going to show you this old drone here, so don't make fun of my one that's repaired, it's been around for a while. But I'm going to relate exactly to the repair, something stupid I did.

                                So we know that any time we change the weight on an aircraft, we add weight, we take weight away, as we burn off fuel, everything changes. And the aircraft may fly when it's out of weight and balance, not loaded correctly, but then you might not be able to deal with an emergency. So the same thing in an unmanned aircraft, it's designed to fly the way it comes out of the box. Now you may be flying something that you really can't add anything to, or maybe you're flying a particular unmanned aircraft that's built to carry load, but you're here as someone working on the remote pilot certificate, so a pretty wide range of how you're planning on using your license and what you'll be doing with unmanned aircraft.

                                So I'm going to give you an example of why this is important. You go to change anything, when I got this one, way back four or five years ago, before any of this went to the FAA and required licenses and all that. So, I didn't like the camera that came with this particular drone. So I remember now putting my GoPro on here, okay? Now, I understand, as a pilot 20 years, I know weight and balance changes everything. But I didn't like the camera, so I thought, "Well, I'm going to mount my GoPro on there." And somehow I came up with, "Oh, there's a GoPro mount underneath." So I was trying to be tricky and put it on there where I thought it might be right to take care of the weight and balance.

Small Unmanned Aircraft Loading

                                 The first time I go to fly this thing, you go to go to a hover, which normally goes right up to hover, it takes off in one direction. It's the same thing we know in helicopters. If we load it wrong, you could pick up and just take off and not be able to pull back on the cyclic. I know this. So being out there, being transparent here, I did something really dumb just because of my own ... My own need to have a better camera on the particular unmanned aircraft that I had at the time.

                                So I can tell you, depending on what you're flying, which unmanned aircraft, you need to do exactly what Gary told you in the video. You need to use the manufacturer's recommendations for whatever the loading should be, and you know the weight and balance, you need to know what you can and can't do, cause it will change their characteristics of the way your unmanned aircraft flies.

                                It could be a danger to you, to someone else, you could destroy your aircraft and you could cause damage to persons and property on the ground if you normally had control over an aircraft you're used to, you go and do something with the weight and balance that's not correct, you may take off and it may just go off one direction. You may not be able to handle an emergency, if something happens. So there's a lot of things that can go wrong, so Gary's three videos are great, and he hits all that stuff of what you have to know, so hopefully that maybe even kind of makes you put it a little bit together, and there's a real world story from an idiot who went out and changed something of a design that's not intended to have loads put on it, and like I said, as soon as I took off, pshh, I couldn't even control the thing.

Small Unmanned Aircraft Loading

                               Got to be very careful. What are you flying, check with your manufacturer's recommendations for what you can and can't do with that aircraft.

                             Gary is a member support, his numbers are there, email is there, contact Gary if you have any questions. Thanks again for being here. We appreciate you being here as members, put your comments down below and we will see you in the next video.

                                All right, that was a video I just shot a few minutes ago before I decided to go live. I was having a blast today. Gary took off on a few days off and I've been editing the new drone course all day. Since I came in this morning and after watching the three videos that Gary had done on the unmanned aircraft loading, I hadn't actually watched those videos, Gary produced those when I wasn't here and had them on the site. I went through and spruced them up a little bit and went through them. I thought, "You know, Gary did a great job going through and giving you the textbook details of everything that's lined out in the remote pilot small unmanned aircraft study guide put out by the FAA."

                                After going through it, I thought, "You know what?  I got a great story to elaborate on why weight and balance is important on an unmanned aircraft, just like a helicopter or an airplane or any other aircraft."

Small Unmanned Aircraft Loading

                                I'm going to roll the number one video from the new remote pilot unmanned course here in just a couple of minutes. Once I put out a little bit about what we're doing. We've been working on this unmanned aircraft systems course for a couple of months now, since Gary went full time. Been working on it daily, just like we're working on the new instrument course and today I was having fun with it. I thought, "It's looking good, we still have a lot to do." But I thought, "I'm going to go ahead and just launch it, make it live." Because we have, for five years, over five years now, we've built training by member feedback. We do the best we can, but until the customer's looking at it from the outside, you don't really know.

                                That's how I completely built Helicopter Online Ground School, so I was in a great mood editing all this stuff earlier. I was having a good time, nice quiet day here, nobody's here today. I'm going through these unmanned aircraft videos piece by piece, going through and doing a lot of editing and adding some new content. We have Maverick Pro available to us that you'll see in a few of the videos and a few of the pictures. We're going to do some more filming with that to spruce up some of the videos. Get them in here and pre-flight, and all those kinds of things.

                                Then Gary's looking at a small unmanned aircraft, but I'm not going to mention any details about that yet. So we're having a lot of fun with that so we're going to keep working on the presentations and our new drone course, unmanned aircraft course, to help you get your certificate, your remote pilot certificate, so you can go out and make money is what this is all about. To help you get the rating.

                                So this course is live today, it's on our site at helicopter ground dot com. It's the number one highlighted, if you go to helicopter ground dot com, you'll find the small unmanned aircraft membership. For right now, it's unlimited, there's no expiration date on it. Because we want to get some people in. We want to get that feedback coming in from our members, what they like, what they need to see, what makes sense, what might need some more elaboration. Because everything we do, nothing we ever call done, because we never just, a product is never finished.

                                Our private, commercial, CFI, instrument, R22, R44, Enstrom, everything that we have, we're always building, we're always adding, we're always updating. And we do that through member feedback. Now that we have Gary here full time, he is our full time member support, Monday through Friday, 8:00 am through 4:00 pm Eastern Standard Time at 574-767-1797. Gary has been doing an incredible job at taking care of members, making sure he gets them answered, getting with me and having me help him if it's something that I need to jump in and get involved with. I still answer customers too, just like this week while Gary's got a couple of days off, I'm still interacting with customers as well, but having Gary here has been such a major deal.

                                If you're interesting in our new drone course, it is 30 day money back guarantee, just like we've done with Helicopter Online Ground School, for five years. It's no hassle money back guarantee, there is no hassle, there is no, "Hey, why don't you like our course? Hey, come back, blah, blah, blah." All you got to do is ask for a simple refund. No product or service is right for every single one person. So we understand that. But we'd love to have some people in, some new members in there helping us dissect the course, see how it looks from the outside looking in, this will be a part of our new FAA wings product, hopefully.

                                We have the private, commercial, CFI is already a go. Gary's been working hard on that. We have a local developer here that is working with the site developers and the FAA. It's in process, it's happening. They're telling us about two weeks it's going to be done. In two weeks we'll be live on the FAA website, the wings program will be ready to go, so our private, commercial and CFI, you'll be able to go through our videos, take a test, get a completion certificate and get wings credit. We will be reporting to the FAA, so all you got to do is go through the videos, complete them all, you have to go through them, complete them, mark them complete, take the test, and then that gets zapped to the FAA and you will get your wings credit.

                                So we're super excited about the wings credit. It's just completely awesome to be able to be recognized and have that offer. Just today I had a gentleman call me up and he said, "Hey, do I get any kind of certificate cause I'm a police officer and they want something at the end of your course if I complete it. Do you have anything like that?" And I said, "Well, as a matter of fact, we're working on that right now. FAA wings credit for the FAA wings program. What more do you need than credit from the FAA that you've completed an approved course?" So we're excited about that.

                            Small Unmanned Aircraft Loading