As a professional R/C flight instructor, I see many students who have had some simulator experience prior to attending my school and I have learned the following:

1. It takes many hours of flying simulators to be very helpfull and reduce the normal stick time with the real models required to solo. I don't see much influence unless the student has at least 100 hours or so on a simulator.
2. The main positive thing I do see, is it helps with the left-right orientation, especially when in the final approach for landing. Students with over 100 hours on a simulator will solo in about half the time it would normally take them to solo if they had no simulator experience because they are not so prone to making left-right mistakes on final.
3. Simulators are good for practicing "up-and-away maneuvers". Example: A newly soloed student was having a bit of fright when trying to fly his model airplane inverted for long periods. He practiced a whole lot of inverted flying on his simulator for a week and was much better at flying inverted the next time he was out at the flying field with his model airplane.
4. Some bad habits can be acquired, (especially when it comes to landing), which have to be "trained out of them" at my school. Precision landings are learned step-by-step, and without an instructor taking them through the steps, wrong, (or less effective) strategies can be learned. Of course this applies to flying real model airplanes as well.
5. Overall, they do much more good than harm and I encourage anyone to use them as a training aid.

I feel that I could train a student on a simulator by putting them through the same repetitions of the landing sequence that I do with the real models. It might take more stick time to do it, and the student would still need at least a few instructed landings with a real model, but I'm sure it would greatly reduce their time to solo.

Those are my thoughts regarding the use of R/C simulators.

Ray Smith
Owner, Hobbies Aloft R/C Flight School