Get a Graupner Tipsy. This was my first airplane and has a kind of futuristic look to it. Its a 3ch plane, but swap out the radio for a 4ch instead, that way when your ready to move up to a full house plane, your not buying a radio again. If you get the combo from Hobby-Lobby, tell them to swap out the radios if they leave out the charger. Then buy MEC's The Brain for 50 bucks, it's AC/DC, for up to 8cells, programmable, with digital display.

Here's the selling points of the airplane:

1. It's setup in a pusher configuration.(ie motor sits behind the wing pointed backwards) Being new the most often crashes are on the nose, which sucks when your motor and prop are there.

2. It's all EPP foam, so when it breaks, and I busted mine up 30 or forty times, its easily fixed with 5min epoxy. Its also never broke in the same place twice, and never lost its flight integrity. I did have to rebalance the wings a couple of times.

3. Cost: The plane is 40 bucks from Hobby Lobby. Everything else is maybe $260. I have my new one in the garage ready to put together.

4. Flight time: True to the ads, she will fly for 30minutes to an hour on a charge.

5. Flying area: Throttled down, baseball field. Full speed, small park.

6. No worries about losing interest in the plane; even when you're proficient flying it, you can practice catching it out of the air, or fly it in 10-20 mph winds.(very challenging)

7. Safety: The most you might do in bruise some one if you hit them with the Tipsy.

Now if someone will name off a couple of Gas trainers that will cover all those selling points, I'll run out and buy one of each.