Hi everyone. I'm a long time lurker and a first time poster.

I'm finally reaching my dream of RC flight thanks to the passion my 8 year old has for airplanes.

After doing quite a bit of studying, I went with a Skyfly for a first plane. I also bought a RealFlight G3.5 and have very many hours on it. With the sim I think I'm doing well in that from a fixed position I can taxi, fly, perform immemnans, fly inverted, outside rolls, etc and put the plane down on the runway pretty accurately. Chase and cockpit are too easy. I find the Mustang, the Nexstar, Electristar and the Spacewalker quite fun and stable for me. The Skyfly in the sim IMHO sucks in that it's painfully slow to respond. In real life out on the field with my Skyfly, I find that also the case. It takes forever for the plane to respond to inputs. I have the trim set nicely and my control surfaces all go full range. I've moved the fishing line knob (sorry I don't have the terminology down) in closer to increase control surface movement and flying on "expert" instead of beginner makes a small improvement.

I'm thinking I just have the wrong plane and need something more responsive. The parks I fly at aren't very big and this plane runs out of room pretty fast considering I use about 2/3 throttle and have to make directional adjustments days in advance. The challenge I'm facing is that since the Skyfly responds so slowly, it runs out of room and hits things! I'm finding it goes through parts faster than I thought it would.

When I am able to get it out on a larger field, then it'll fly great and there are no problems - except for it's sluggishness. Unfortunately there's only one big field around here and it usually has people on it!

The long term goal is for the two of us to chase each other around the sky with warbirds. Since I'm a teacher, I don't have deep pockets and want something extremely durable, nimble yet stable, and cheap would be great. I ordered two Air Hogs Aces for us to play with but I'd like a better park flyer for myself.

Any suggestions?

Any and all opinions and comments are greatly appreciated!

thanks
Tim