Absolutely on the sim!. When I bought my axe, the guys at the LHS said, don't buy a heli now, buy the sim first. I said I wasn't interested and that I was just gonna learn the old fashioned way....yeah right! [:@] So after a week ,I bought an esky sim for $30. It was ok, but only to learn what the sticks do. So I sold that and ended up buying the realflight G3.5 . It made all the difference in the world! though still not exactly like the real thing IMHO, it gives you a much more realistic feel and improves your reflexes, a few tweaks in the sim set up does make it pretty close to the real thing. My charger battery choice was the FMA cellpro 4s for $65 and a megapower 1350mah for $28. You can only charge one battery at a time with that charger but it is a balancer as well and is supposed to be one of the safer chargers, also displays useful charging info. Hope this helps.