aeajr...

Thanks for listening to my "nitro" perspective on the issue! I agree with you, most of the guys getting into e-flight from the start are going with smaller park flyers and foamies.

Why am I going brushless and LiPo? To get great performance with a decent runtime. I've been looking at park flyers and foamies for awhile now, and all of the videos I've seen of brushed motor and NiCd/NiMH setups showed me that these planes did not have the performance I wanted, and most of them were what I would consider underpowered. I've also seen videos of park flyers with really good performance, and they are always brushless/LiPo setups. From what I've seen, if you just want something like an electric glider to do some "gentle" flying, then the cheaper power setup is fine. I saw a friend fly his Aerobird Challenger this weekend, and it looks like a fun plane, but it won't do much aerobatics. I want something with some vertical performance, or very close to it, anyway.

What plane am I building? I'm mainly into SPADs for planes at this point, so I'm building a "SPAD" foamie found on the http://www.spadtothebone.com website (it's on the right side of that page). There's a picture of it below (from the plans, mine isn't completed yet), and you can hit the link below to see a video of this thing flying with a brushless/LiPo setup almost identical to what I'm going to use...

[link=http://spadtothebone.com/videos/sfsflying.wmv]SPAD Foamie Video[/link]