One thing I'll add about electric pattern, I flew my smaragd for the first time on saturday, spent about 9 mins in total in the air, and I was up there for 3 hours. Like JAS says if you want to go to field and get practice in, take an IC plane, keep the electric as your competition or to fly once in while as it takes ages to charge the batteries. I loved flying mine and the power is unbelieable, but I'll always have an IC powered plane so that I can practice on.