flightom,
I can understand your desire to get into warbirds. Some of them can be just plain "sexy". There are some great looking planes out there. But there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all look at the full scale warbirds. These planes are almost always designed to be fast, maneuverable, and hard to see. Almost all of these characteristics stay with the plane when they are scaled down to our size. In the past this has almost always been true. In the last few years there has been a push by some companies to make warbirds a little bit easier to handle. The first that comes to mind would be Hanger 9. They have come out with several very good warbirds that actually fly more like sport acrobatic planes. I just finished doing a review of the Hanger 9 P-40 for RCU (unfortunately the review hasn't been posted in the [link=http://www.rcuniverse.com/magazine/]RCU Magazine[/link] yet). But I can tell you that it didn't fly as much like a warbird as it did a sport acrobatic plane. It was a very well behaved warbird. But not all of the companies out there are doing the same thing with their warbirds that Hanger 9 has been. I don't know that much about Nitro Planes right now, so I couldn't say whether they are good or not.

With all of that in mind you really need to ask yourself if you are ready for a hot sport plane, because a warbid is going to be at least that hard to fly. If you haven't flown your second or third plane yet you may want to wait for a bit before moving into a warbird. Flying a [link=http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXH756&P=0]Goldberg Tiger II[/link], a [link=http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXFG18&P=7]Sig Something Extra[/link], or a [link=http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXCHY3&P=0]Sig 4-[/link]Star would be a good start in getting ready for a warbird. Once you are comfortable flying those you might be ready to move up to the warbird.

Good luck. Here are a few shots from the review I did of the P-40

Hope this helps

Ken