Mike/Mike,

If the Futaba 9C has servo slow you can use it to sequence the gear & doors as I have done with my JR 9303.

I can't give much advise on a gyro. My first experience was a few months ago when I decided I needed to do something to improve my Gripen's ground handing. I did an RCU search on "steering gyro". The concensus seemed to be that if using a gyro for steering only that a cheap piezo gyro would suffice. Several guys recommended the GWS PG-03, available from Tower.
http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin...?&I=LXHHS2&P=7

I did have a few set up issues with it on the Gripen. It doesn't seem to like Hitec servos. I tried several different ones and they either worked erratically or not at all. Any JR servo I tried with it worked fine. So I swaped out my steering servo with a JR and it really helped the Gripen. I don't expect that the F-16 will be as bad as the Gripen was initially but I was concerned about the narrow track, so I bought another one for the F-16 just to be safe.

Joe