ORIGINAL: scriptt
YES!
I went out to a narrow dirt road and solo’d my very first flight and landed the plane with ease and no bouncing. I think formal training is BS and overrated, im sure a lot of instructors feel threatened by the new sims and heavily promote their business. But if you practice the sim correctly for a long enough period of time, than the answer to your question is yes, absolutely. I did it myself.
There is no "business" in teaching anyone to fly R/C, as I've never heard of anyone profiting from it. Except if you want to think of the joy of having a student solo for the first time, after a good deal of flying sessions full of hard work, as profit, then yeah I guess it could be. The reward is teaching and passing the hobby on to others with a similar interest. SCRIPTT, you've got guts to do what you did, and you are the top percentile that takes up R/C. Being a private pilot myself, and growing up with my dad being in R/C (but not really caring enough to teach my brother and I to fly), I might have done it alone had sims been around in '93 like they are today. But like others have pointed out, most people who jump into this hobby probably don't have that kind of self-assurance and need a good team of support members (healthy local club) to aid them along in making the right choices. Because lets face it.....a few costly, wrong choices and a budding R/C pilot could be discouraged enough to drop out of the hobby all together.
Keep punchin' holes in the air,
~Ronbo