Akkana and Dave Crash Electric Planes

For beginners thinking about trying electric R/C flying: I hesitate to suggest any particular model, since individual tastes and abilities vary greatly (though if you have plenty of space, you can't go too wrong with a T-Hawk). Do get something fairly rugged, or else cheap and easy to fix. You will crash.

I do have a couple of suggestions about the other equipment.

On batteries: Lithium Polymer batteries have completely revolutionized electric flying. If there's any chance that you might become seriously interested in flying, you will use li-po batteries eventually. So don't invest much money in a charger that only handles Ni-Cad and NiMH. Starting with NiMH is fine (especially if you buy a plane that comes with them, like a T-Hawk), just don't buy an expensive charger. You may even want to consider starting with li-po (though the batteries are a more dangerous and the chargers more expensive). Dave and I both were very frustrated as beginners because our underpowered, heavy planes kept losing power and crashing; the switch to li-po, for us, was a switch from frustration to fun.

On transmitters: I expected I'd want several planes, so I bought a general 4-channel transmitter rather than a plane that came with its own dedicated transmitter. But I soon found out that with several planes, you really want a transmitter that can store different settings for each plane. So I ended up having to buy a new transmitter anyway. But then I wanted to try combat wings and other elevon planes, and the second transmitter didn't have proper elevon mixing, and it didn't have settings for enough planes, so I had to upgrade yet again. (Fortunately transmitters sell pretty well on ebay.) So don't worry too much about whether your first transmitter will meet all your future needs. It won't, so go ahead and start with something cheap, and if you get deeply into flying, you can upgrade later. (If you're curious, I ended up with a JR 6102, which stores settings for ten planes including their trim settings, and I'm quite happy with it.)

Dave's Early Planes