What makes a good trainer? Answer: A good instructor. The right way to learn to fly RC is to find a good instructor and actually use a buddy box controller. Everything else is secondary. The purpose of the whole trainer thing is to teach a beginner how to fly without incurring serious model destruction during the process. There is no perfect trainer airplane. However, some (including the Sig Kadet, Goldberg Eaglet 50 or Eagle 63) are significantly better for training than others. But even these great trainers could not guarantee a beginner could learn to fly by themselves. 40 years ago when these kits were popular, most of the folks stepping into RC had already developed sufficient building skills through building control line or free flight models. Therefore, building an RC trainer was well within their skill set and the Kadet or Eagle were viable options. Not so today. Many beginners today have spent too much time playing video games and never acquired the necessary shop skills to build a balsa model. These folks are now at the mercy of the Ready to Fly (Crash) model manufacturers. There are some modern RTF foam aircraft that can be used successfully to teach a student how to fly. These pretty much have the same characteristics as previously mentioned in this string on basic trainers, i.e. wingspan greater than 40 inches, wing loadings less than 20 ounces per square foot, tricycle landing gear, well behaved at low speed, gentle stall characteristics, stable, moderate power loading, not particularly fast, mellow control responses and normally have electric motors for better reliability than glow engines. A student can learn to fly on any of the previously described models if he/she will just find a good instructor and use a buddy box. A couple of the more popular training aircraft that work well include the Eflite Apprentice and the HobbyZone AeroScout S2 RTF models. These come equipped with a Spektrum AS3X (Assisted Stability 3 Axis) receiver with selectable SAFE mode to initially limit the amount of pitch and bank the model can achieve and include a panic switch to return the model to upright flight. These modern features can artificially provide the stability found in the older trainers. The RTF model versions come with a Spektrum DXs entry level transmitter and only costs $20 more than the Bind and Fly version. Although the DXs transmitter is devoid of most features that the student will want in the future, for the additional $20, the DXs transmitter makes a very good buddy box to link up with the instructor's wireless trainer capable master transmitter. (Or the student can go ahead and buy the Spektrum NX6 or NX8 transmitter (that they will need later) and bind the DXs transmitter as a buddy box to the NX "master" instructor transmitter.