Thats true. Why is there this impression that ARFs are bought by people that never flew a plane before? I mean ARFs are not "Ready to Fly" out of the box. You need to already have a bunch of stuff to use them. ARF's get you 95% of the way there and leave it up to you to finish.

I'm building a TF P-40 right now and in that manual it clearly says that I am responsible to putting it together right. TF is counting on ME to make it flyable. They are not responsible for it. I don't see why ARFs should be thought of any differently. Just because some of the work is done for you doesn't mean you should forget everything that your common sense tells you to do. If you don't check an ARF, you sure as heck are going to build a sloppy plane as well.

On the subject of bad ARFs, I just finished an article in this months Fly RC for an AK Models SU-27. This is a kit in which the author needed to adjust wheel size, takeoff pitch differential and ENLARGE the elevator to get it to fly right! He still seemed to like the plane. Bad models are not only regulated to ARFs!

As far as the mass production "Planes Crashing by the Hundreds or Thousands" argument, its just not true. ARFs are EVERYWHERE. Yet somehow there is not a mass hysteria brewing as people run for their lives to avoid crashing ARFs. For the one person that had the firewall come unglued on their Hangar 9 Corsair, there are thousands that never had a problem (maybe even more). However, the pictures of successful planes never seem to make it in the forums. Just because something is mass produced does not mean a problem in the production of one unit is mass produced as well.