How about a personal review of the Aerobird from a new RCer, me. I looked at
the Firebird II, XL, Fighterbird and the Aerobird. With three channels you can
do a lot more, so I went with the Aerobird.

I was not interested in building. If I spent a month building and then
wrecked it, I would be crushed. I wanted a RTF that could take some
punishment.

I am a first timer. After several months of research, talking to people,
flyers and non, I bought an Aerobird. It is a super value. Today you would
get the Aerobird Challenger, which is even
better than the original Aerobird.

Here are the plusses and minuses in my mind of the Aerobird Challenger.

Very inexpensive and rugged for a three channel starter - $110-$150
The plane comes complete and fully assembled. Charge the flight battery, put
on the wing, put the batteries in the transmitter and up you go! Even the
batteries for the transmitter are included.

New flyers may crash so you don't want something costly to
start with or had to fix. There is a full line of parts available at
reasonable cost. You
can replace the whole main fuselage for $49 including the motor and all the
flight electronics. A wing is $15 and the tail is $9.

Batteries and charger:

The battery will run for a full 6-7 minutes at full throttle and 12-15
minutes at half throttle. Many planes in this class run 4-5 minutes. And,
unlike many of the 2 channel starters, it comes with a peak charger that you
can use to charge your batteries in your car. If you pick up two or three
spare
batteries you can stay in the air all day. A full recharge charge takes about
30-40 minutes. I hafe 5 batteries and two chargers.


WIND

All new flyers should start in winds under 5 MPH so that you are learning to
fly the plane rather than fighting the wind. I didn't do that and crashed a
lot because of the wind. However, now I am very comfortable flying this plane
in 10-12 MPH winds. Handles it very well.

27 MHZ vs 72 MHZ Radio - For North American Flyers

The Aerobird uses a 27 MHZ radio which is assigned to general use for planes,
cars and boats; mostly low end stuff. There are only 6 available channels in
the US. So, if you have a kid with a RC car in the same area where you are
flying, and he is on the same channel you are on, and he is close enough, when
he switches on his transmitter, you will lose control of the plane and
probably crash. After 100+ flights I have never had a problem, but experienced
flyers will bring this up, so I mention this here.

Even with 72 MHZ radio systems, this can happen if you get two flyers on the
same channel.. We had a incident like this at our field recently. Plane was
destroyed. Both flyers were on channel 58. One guy had just arrived. He
turned on his radio to check the battery voltage without checking to see if
the frequency was clear. A plane in the air came straight down and was
destroyed. Frequency management is important no matter if you are on 27 or 72
MHZ .

The flight control for the Aerobird is a single stick radio with rudder and
elevator on the stick. Throttle is on a slide on the left top. It is similar
to the arrangement on the Hitec single stick radio I use to fly my Spirit
sailplane. I find it very comfortable to
use and other flyers who have tried it say they find it easy as well.

If you are going to join a club, check with them. Some clubs will not admit 27
MHZ based planes because they can't be flown with a buddy box, a training
system, like a dual controlled car. This is used for pilot training.

After long consideration I bought the Aerobird and am very happy I did. I have
since brought 4 new pilots into the hobby who now have Aerobirds and they have
all been very successful.

These are things I took into consideration. My club, www.lisf.org has many
Firebird and Aerobird pilots, so the Aerobird was welcome

Here is an internet site that has a link for a video of the plane flying:
http://www.parkflyers.com/html/aerobird.html

That's my evaluation of the Aerobird and why I purchased it. I fly as
often as I can. I have over 100 flights on my plane since the end of March.
The Aerobird helped me learn to fly. What I learned I have used to expand my
fleet to 8 planes, both electrics and sailplanes. My friend has a Wingo and a
Glider. He liked flying my Aerobird so much he bought one too.