I must say yes here. I learned to fly planes before I knew of sims, but when I got into heli's I got one, in the 4+ years of flying and in the last couple doing 3D stuff, I have not crashed to pilot error. I am a firm believer if you get a good sim it will help. My brother, was 14 at the time, I let him have my old sim, he cant fly planes or heli's, he used the sim, got pretty good at the planes so I let him fly a model, he could do it. He practiced flying the heli and got the hang of it a little, let him try my LMH100+, he actually got to hovering it in a shorter amount of time than it took me years ago!

And it good to brush up on flying in bad weather and what not.