If you are comfortable flying your heli, you should be able to get your plane up, around and back on the ground in the same number of pieces as you started with. By way of field preparation before flight:

1. Orient yourself to a flight "traffic pattern", a rectangular path around the field and in front of you. In the air, make it a point to fly your plane in this pattern - do not just flail around the sky. Plan to fly straight and level, make a specific entry into a turn, recover to straight and level. After takoff, you will usually need to come back a bit on the throttle. You do not need to fly full throttle all the time. Your first flight will be a "trim" flight. Of course, you will set all control surfaces to nuetral before you fly the plane, but expect to make some trim adjustments in the air. It is a great help if you have a buddy who can make trim changes while you are flying. "Give a couple clicks of up elev" or "right aileron" and the helper can move the trim tabs while you keep your hands on the sticks. If no helper, you get to do it yourself. If so, don't drop your gaze down to the transmitter, but raise the transmitter to your line of sight with the plane while you are trimming.

2. Before you take off, or even start up the engine, establish a landmark or some sort of guide line that will represent a position to be aligned with when turning final for landing. This should be a position on your traffic pattern. This position is key to a good landing, as when you are intent on landing, you will want to be lined up, at reduced throttle, and basically interfere with the plane as little as possible to "let " it land. Final approach is not the place to be giving lots of control inputs.

3. Make your initial flights short - say 5 or 6 minutes. Initial flights can be stressfull and mentally fatiguing. You don't want to be forming bad habits at this point. Bad habits come about when you begin to lapse into "crash avoidance" mindset instead of "flying" mindset.

4. Expect success!