My first glow trainer was a Nexstar Select RTF. I bought it back in April 2005 and I learned to solo with it. Shortly after I solo'd, a flight instructor was showing me how to do touch and goes and lost it due to lack of radio response. I had put it into a tree a few weeks earlier on a long landing approach, I decided that another rebuild wasn't worth the time.

Rather than lose valuable flying time, I bought a used Hangar 9 Easy Fly 40 trainer from a local hobby store that sometimes sold such things. I think I paid $45 for it, and it came with a Hobbico aileron servo and Fults landing gear. I flew that trainer for the remainder of 2005 and all of 2006. It was an ugly plane with a wing that sat crooked in the saddle, a tail that sat crooked on the fuselage, and landing gear that hung oddly bent from the belly of the plane. It flew good, though.

For the spring of 2007, I decided to treat myself to a new trainer. I bought a Tower Hobbies .40 MkII ARF and stuck my Easy Fly .40 away in the garage. I loved the Tower Trainer .40 MkII ARF and flew it a great deal all through the year. I set it up with full throws and found it to be surprisingly aerobatic. When our club auction rolled around in October, I sold the Easy Fly .40. In early November, I took the Tower Trainer out flying on a day with gusty wind conditions. As I was bringing it in over the runway, a huge gust of wind popped up the nose of the plane while it was about ten feet above our asphalt runway. The plane flipped over upside down and backwards and splattered on it's back onto the runway before I could do anything except blink.

I loved my Tower Trainer, but I thought I'd try something different. I'd loved my Hangar 9 Easy Fly 40 as well, so I thought I'd give Hangar 9 another try. I ordered a H9 Solo Star .40 ARF, and I've been flying it through 2008 so far.

The Solo Star is a pretty good package overall, but there are a couple of things about the plane that are bugging me. The covering sucks. The Solo Star is a Value Series ARF, and it uses a shelf paper type covering rather than Ultracote. It splits easily and wrinkles don't respond very well to heat. I already have enough box tape on the wings that you'd think I've been flying it for a couple of seasons already. The wing tips also feature plastic caps instead of being finished with covering. They look pretty good though, and the plastic isn't brittle, so they're not too awful.

The other problem is that I can't get the ailerons to move. The torque rod setup just keeps getting jammed up and I can't get any significant roll rates out of it. I've tried carving out the torque rod channels, flexing the control surfaces by hand to "stretch" the range of movement, and trimming the plastic wing tip caps away from the ailerons, but to no avail. My original Nexstar rolled like a Super Sportster compared to this Solo Star trainer.

There are some days where I just enjoy taking a trainer out to the field instead of my King Kobra or Staudacher S-300. I enjoy relaxed flying, and it's fun to push a stable, predictable airplane. I also enjoy taking up folks for "intro flights" and training friends who can't make it to the club's training night. I can't do any of these things with a trainer that can't do a basic roll.

Tonight I decided to take the plunge and buy myself the nicest trainer that I could think of. I'm going ahead and taking advantage of the Great Planes sale on the Goldberg Protege .60 ARF, I ordered one from Omni Models for $119.99 delivered.

At a wingspan of 71.5", it's about as large of an airplane as will fit in my Hyundai Elantra. I have a new-in-the-box Thunder Tiger GP-61 2-stroke that should go perfect with it. I'm excited about the fact that the Protege .60 ARF comes covered with Ultracote, and that it uses dual aileron servos. I think this is going to be a nice large trainer that will be slow and gentle and easy for students to fly yet flexible enough to rev up and have fun with when I'm flying it alone.

I considered the Sig Kadet Senior ARF, but I didn't think it would be as aerobatic as the Protege. It was also $100 more expensive. I also seriously thought about trying the VMar Apache III ARF, but I decided to go with the Goldberg instead. One of these days I'm going to try a VMar ARF just so I can find out if they're worthy of all the abuse people seem to heap upon them. With the Protege on sale for almost the same cost as the Tower Trainer .60 MkII ARF, I figured I would go ahead and treat myself.

I'm excited about this purchase. I think the Protege will be a good trainer for me to fly for a long time to come. I also hope that I can hang onto it for a while and that I won't be in the trainer market again for a long time. This is my fourth season flying RC planes and I'm flying 3D planes, pattern planes, scale IMAC planes, and helicopters. I still can't imagine being "bored" with flying a trainer. I hope I always have a nice, big glow trainer in my hanger to share with others and to enjoy on days when I just don't feel like flying 100 mph with my hair on fire.

There is a picture of each of my previous and current trainers. I have fond memories of each of them. I'm happy to report that a fellow club member bought my old Easy Fly 40 at the auction last year and he flew it at our Memorial Day egg burn. I think I was more excited to see it flying than he was.