For those of you that are reading posts on this thread for the first time and possibly confused and maybe deciding to buy a an AXE CP, I'd like add my story:

I've owned a Kyosho Nexus 30 nitro heli for about 6 years and after spending about $1500 for the heli, accessories and parts from learning to hover, it's been sitting on the shelf for about 3 of the 6 years in basically new condition. A friend had a similar nitro heli and actually had his off of the training stand a few times with minor mishaps almost everytime. After grounding ourselves for years due to the frustrations from learning and spending money on replacement parts my friend did a little research about a month ago and we both decided to buy an AXE CP.

We put our decals and training gear on and charged our batteries. I kept telling him, "Tomorrow, I'm going to lighten this thing up and see what happens". Both having experienced the frustrations from our nitro heli's we kind of laughed about it and he said laughing out loud "Yea, you first!". He definitely had more success than I did being the owner of the training stand that we used for our nitro heli's along with having his nitro a year or so longer than I had mine. But it’s been at least 3 years since either of us had ours running. I should mention that he has RealFlight and had been flying the AXE CP on the simulator. I tried it a couple of times but have chose to get my training more hands on, aside from the simulator.

The next day we took them to where I work which has a 100' x 40' indoor parking garage. After business hours, it's empty and the perfect place to learn to fly. I turned my radio on, plugged in the battery and put the canopy on. Having a few quick flashbacks from the nitro days we kind of looked at each other with that old familiar fear. I slowly gave it some throttle and aside from the torque turning the nose a little, it came off the ground about two feet and I hovered it for about 5 seconds until I lost control and set it back down. Understanding hovering height & trim along with slowly remembering stick usage, within our first three charges we both had done better in those three charges than the years that we experimented with our nitro heli's.

I've been a little more daring and less cautious with mine learning to fly so I've had some mishaps and had to replace a few parts but I've came a long way even from that good first day. I may have gone about a few things the wrong way but I bought three standard battery packs right from the start instead of a higher capacity battery pack. I'm starting to second guess that decision a little and may upgrade soon but if you are new to heli's, I think it's going to take you a long time to get comfortable flying using just one battery. Trust me, the addiction cannot be fed by using just one battery.

I haven't read where anyone mentions a list of spare parts to have on hand. I would recommend a minimum of having a spare set of main blades, blade grips, linkage set and a tail rotor. All of these, I have replaced. Again, if you take it very easy, you may not need any of this but a little more aggressive training may cause you to have some mishaps. I've had three mishaps. The first was when I was trying to hover in my driveway when it was a little windy. I knew better but instead of picking up the heli and moving it back to the center of the driveway after having kind of a poor hover, I lifted off close to the wall in my driveway and got a minor gust of wind and lost a little control and while setting it back down, it slid and hit the wall. The main blades were going so slow that when it slid and the first blade hit, the tip broke and the blades stopped spinning. That crash cost me main blades but definitely was my fault for being stupid. The second was in my parking garage at work where I was hovering nose in and lost orientation at only about 3' off the ground and came down on the back of my skids (with the training gear on) and it bounced hard enough off center to hit the main blades, break a blade grip, one of the linkage arms and bend the tail boom a little. Both my friend & I were very surprised at the damage caused by what didn't appear to be that bad of a crash. And, my 3rd and most recent mishap was yesterday when descending and it started to slide backwards and caught on the tail fin support rod and flipped over. That cost me a blade grip & tail rotor blade and I had to straighten the tail boom again. Only about an $8 fix. I also had to tighten the screws on the main motor, which worked loose and moved the motor away from the main rotor gear in which one screw took nearly 3 turns. That sounds like it may have been fairly loose from the factory to take that many turns. The funny thing was after that crash, I was back up and running in less that 10 minutes and it flew more stable than before. I was very glad to see that even though I broke a blade grip surprisingly neither main blade was damaged.

So, what would my suggestions be to someone thinking of buying an AXE CP? BUY IT! Get some basic spare parts when you order the heli and do something about the battery even if it's to buy a few spares but most of all have fun. It probably sounds like I’ve destroyed mine while learning but most all of my crashes were not “drop out of the sky” crashes, very minor and I would write them off to learning. What about buying a simulator or upgrading the servos or buying a different radio? I would buy the heli, learn to fly it and then decide if you want to put more money into the upgrades. This thing flies great right out of the box. I do think that the simulator can help you with nose in flying and coordination but there is no replacement for actual in field learning. I'm already excited about going to fly today even as I am typing this message