Tag Archives: YouTube

R44 Helicopter Panel Overview

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A video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

Lots of people have been asking me to give them more information about the helicopter itself, so here’s my first plain information video. In it, I give you a guided tour of my helicopter’s instrument panel, from top to bottom. Airplane pilots will recognize a bunch of the instruments, but there are also a few that are helicopter-only. Keep in mind that this is just an overview — I don’t go into deep detail about any of the instruments or knobs that I discuss. The video has two parts — I got a phone call from a client and had to fly while I was in the middle of recording it — so you get the added benefit of seeing the instruments actually reading something near the end. Can you spot the blades still spinning?

I’ve also gotten requests to show what my helicopter looks like, so I included a photo in the beginning. I should mention here that the intro music was created for me years ago by Mac author Bob Levitus; I’m only using a tiny piece of the opus he composed and recorded for me. (Maybe I’ll use the whole thing as background music for a flight in the future.)

I mention in this video that I can be tracked in flight via ADS-B. You might try https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n7534d to see a list of my recent flights. Click Play to see my route. If I’m in flight when you look, it’ll show you my flight progress. Flightradar24 can track all kinds of airplanes — including commercial flights — and even has iOS and Android apps so you can track flights on your mobile device.

If you have any comments or requests, please put them below. I do read all the comments and use them to improve future videos. I don’t answer questions that are answered in the video description, so you may want to read these before posting questions.

If you haven’t caught on yet, I release flying videos on Sunday mornings and “extras” midweek. I hope you subscribe and tell your friends! I’m trying hard to build the channel into a library of videos folks want to watch and share and every new subscriber motivates me to make more, better videos.

Helicopter Cherry Drying Lesson

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A video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

Join me and Justin for a quick look at some of the orchards we’re responsible for drying this season followed by a cherry drying lesson. This is 90% of what a helicopter pilot needs to know to be a cherry drying pilot. (Don’t try this at home, kids!)

Justin is doing most of the flying in this video. I’m sitting in the left seat, waving my hands around an awful lot and providing directions to see the orchards and then instructions as we fly low-level on a practice flight over the fruit. It’s a sunny day — I don’t teach during real-life cherry drying missions. This video is kind of long but I think it’s interesting enough to keep most folks watching.

Helicopter Landing at Hood River

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A video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

In this video, I’m on my way from Wenatchee, WA to Hood River, OR to deliver my helicopter to my mechanic for its annual inspection. Weather prevented me from flying the direct route, which would take me between Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens to cross the Cascades. At this point in the flight, I’ve been dodging clouds and low weather for about a half hour and I just can’t seem to go in the direction I want to go. Hood River is nearby and I have to pee, so I make a detour and land there.

What’s really cool about this video is the clouds. Helicopter pilots seldom fly above the clouds but nearly all of this video has clouds below me. You’ll also see a rainbow over my head for a good portion of this clip and great views of Mt. Hood out ahead of me.

I hope you enjoy the flight. Keep the comments coming and please tell your friends about my channel. The more people who tune in, the more often I’ll drop these. Thanks for stopping by!

Flying Home from Taco Night

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A video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

I took my friend Cyndi and her husband Matt on a helicopter ride and they invited me over for dinner afterwards. It was taco night at her house. So I parked the helicopter in her side yard, went in with Penny for dinner, and flew home afterwards. Here’s that short flight.

I narrated this video because I was really tired from a lot of flying on a hot day and really didn’t say much during the flight. So rather than listen to a lot of silence, I thought I’d use the narration feature of my video editing software to say what I should have said during the flight. Let me know what you think. Rest assured that if the in-flight audio is interesting, I’d much rather use that.

My YouTube Surprise

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I check into my AdSense account and find a bunch of money.

I’ve been publishing helicopter videos on YouTube for more than 10 years. I was always fiddling around with one kind of camera or another, getting footage in flight, and then putting that footage online. Lots of people found it interesting. I just thought it was neat to share something that had become quite commonplace to me.

In 2016, I set up my YouTube account for monetization. That means that when YouTube put an ad at the beginning of one of my videos, I’d get a cut of the money they collected from the advertiser. I didn’t expect it to be very much — after all, it wasn’t as if my videos went viral or anything. I didn’t even have that many subscribers.

That apparently all changed at least a year ago. Somehow, the Flying M Air YouTube channel attracted more than 43,000 subscribers. And one of my videos — Home to Airport, by Helicopter — got 8.6 million views.

I didn’t know this. I’d set up YouTube to contact me via a Gmail account I never check so I never got any communication from them. I actually learned all this the other day when I was poking around my YouTube channel.

Wow, I thought to myself. That’s kind of cool. But shouldn’t I have earned some money with all those views?

I poked around some more. I wanted to make sure I’d set up YouTube with the correct banking information. I had a hard time finding where the settings for that were. But before I found it, I found something else: $7,700 of earnings in my AdSense account.

My Earnings
Surprise!

It seems that for the past three years, Google had been collecting ad revenue on ads played at the beginning of some of my videos and had been faithfully recording my share in my account on their system.

But why wasn’t I getting paid? It turned out that I’d never completed the setup — I’d never given Google my tax ID or banking information. Duh-oh!

You can bet I handed over that information as soon as I figured out where I needed to enter it.

And the next morning, all that money appeared magically in my savings account.

Needless to say, I’m now very motivated to create new videos. I hadn’t realized it, but it had been about two years since I uploaded one. There were hundreds of comments waiting to be moderated and many were from people asking me why I wasn’t making more videos.

I’ve been doing a bit of flying lately and I set up one of my GoPros to capture video and audio of most of my flights. I put together the other day and, a day later, created a short at the end of that flight.

Bonneville Dam
One of the highlights of Tuesday’s flight was an overflight of the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River.

I just went through the new comments on those videos. Most folks are thanking me for uploading new videos and telling me they want more. It’s very rewarding — and I’m not talking about the fraction of a cent I get for each view. It’s nice to know folks are out there waiting for new content. It’s nice to have them welcome me back as if they really missed me.

I’ll do my best to record new videos while flying — including new cherry drying videos this summer — and get them online. I hope you’ll check them out and maybe even subscribe to my YouTube channel: FlyingMAir.