Good day. My name is Connie Hego. I'm a flight instructor at Heliwest
which is one of the largest onshore operators in Western Australia.
I work as a flight instructor teaching students and one of the first things we do
when we get to work is check out the weather to see if the weather is suitable.
So Jandakot, there's going to be a bit of thunderstorms for today so there might be ah...
an issue for flying with students.
We'll go and get the files for the student that's on my schedule today.
And then we're going to have a pre-flight or daily inspection of the aircraft to make sure it's in good shape and nothing's wrong with it.
The call sign of our machine here is Zulu, Golf, Yankee.
We've got to make sure all the maintenance has been completed on this.
Once we're happy with that, we're going to continue on into the hangar.
Most students here are commercial pilots, meaning they're
doing a commercial licence which allows them to actually work
as a pilot. For a commercial licence there are 105 hours of pilot training
and you have to pass a series of exams - seven in total.
The exams that we do are quite time demanding.
There's a lot of study to be done. If you're doing a quick
sort of full-time course you can get it done in three to four months if you work hard.
So it's called a pre-flight checklist and it's a very systematic
checklist. It needs to be followed for safety purposes.
Checking the fuel
so we're doing the light switches, testing that
the warning lights are working in the aircraft.
So that's done. We'll flick the battery off.
We'll have a look at the fuel lines, make sure they're in good condition.
The oil here - make sure there's enough oil in the reservoir
and the temperature stickers here that they haven't overheated on the gearbox.
We're actually going to step on to the frame of the helicopter here
and have a look at the rotor head and make sure that all the nuts are bolted tight
and that there's no sort of leaks around the covers where the oil is.
At the back here, we're going to check
the tail rotor and make sure there are no dings or dents on that
and it's in good condition and the rivets are there.
Check the blades of the tail rotor
and make sure they're in place and they're not damaged.
At the rear, one of the most dangerous parts of the helicopter is the tail rotor.
You'll get a pretty good haircut if you get anywhere near that thing.
What you have here - in a helicopter you have three basic controls.
You have the cyclic stick.
You have the collective lever here
and then you have the pedals in front.
If I move this cyclic stick, it's basically controlling the altitude and speed of the helicopter
so it goes forward, back, left and right.
But if we move this collective lever
up, what we can actually see is the blades moving up and down.
It's actually increasing the angle - what we call the pitch angle - of the blades.
Basically this is an up and down so it controls the power of the helicopter (power output)
but it also controls the height up and down so if we want the
helicopter to go up, we raise this lever up and it will start climbing.
The pedal is used to sort of keep direction of the tail rotor.
If you look at the back of the tail rotor here,
push the left pedal and the nose of the helicopter will turn left.
Push on the right pedal and the nose will turn right.
All right. We're going to have a look at some of the instruments that are inside.
You've got an altimeter which will show you the height in hundreds of feet here.
The vertical speed indicator will show us how fast we're climbing or descending in flight.
This is your speed indicator showing you how fast you're flying in knots
air speed or miles per hour on the inner scale.
These are power instruments to show you how much power you're using.
I always wanted to fly. I was already interested in flying since I was a little kid.
So I started when my dad first took me out to an oil rig when I was 10 years old.
And I've always wanted to fly.
I started researching after high school to see if it was possible to do.
What I ended up doing was saving up a bit of money and moved to America to start my flight training.
When I started I researched both the civil side and the military side.
I had an interview with the military but I decided to go with the civil route.
There's a chopper coming in behind us.
For my career, I'm happy with the company I'm working for now.
It allows me to do a variety of things
sort of what I'll probably end up doing is a bit of offshore
flying because it's a good way of building your experience.