pbjones81,
I am glad that this product worked for you, but you are in the minority. My experience with instructing and watching newer pilots that use a product like this is that their flying skills develop slower than they would without the product. They tend to rely on the co-pilot to recover plane instead of actually developing the skills needed to do it themselves. In fact, this can cause a false sense of security in newer pilots that can come back and haunt them in a very serious way. They get to a point where they think they have the skills to move up to a 2nd plane only to discover the hard way that they don't know how to recover the airplane when it gets into any situation other than level flight, and then watch helplessly as their plane crashes. So I will say most definitely that this product becomes a crutch. It's nothing degrading about the pilot when I say that because it's just human nature, they will tend to rely on the co-pilot whenever they can. As far as "stressful" situations go, to be totally honest with you learning to handle the plane when there is "stress" is actually part of learning to fly. New pilots need to train their brains to think quickly and decide what they are going to do to right their plane. Trust me, when you have a plane heading at the ground at 100+ mph you're not going to have too much time to decide what you're going to do to save it. And besides, there shouldn't be that much stress considering that there is an instructor standing next to you and you are using the buddy box. That instructor will keep you from crashing your plane. And as your skills develop and you get better at recovering the airplane he will give you more time to save it yourself before he takes over, and eventually you'll be trained to the point that he won't need to take over anymore. Can the co-pilot mechanism do that? Nope, not at all.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not blasting you for the fact that you like the co-pilot because I'm not. I'm glad that you liked it and could benefit from it. But you are in a small minority of people that have benefited from it. The majority of people will actually have more harm done by it than good. Yes, you had good results with it. But you are only one person, and Bruce, myself, and other instructors have seen many beginners have just the opposite results as you observed. And for someone to come in here and try to say that it's a good product to train students with is actually doing a disservice to them. That's why I'm pointing out that your results aren't the norm for this product. Beginning pilots need to know that the copilot product is going to more than likely cause them to spend MORE time learning to fly than if they didn't use it.

Ken