Ok, anybody that has been around this forum for any length of time has probably heard me sing the praises of the Tower Trainers. Now I won't go and say that they are "The Best" trainer ever made, but I will stand firmly that they are indeed the best bargain in a trainer that is available today. They fly great and they are priced very reasonably, and I can't even begin to count how many students have trained on them over the years. When asked for recommendations I will usually point people towards the Tower Trainers.

So here's where the kudos come in. We recently had a guy join our club who wanted to learn to fly, so he asked what I recommended as a trainer. So I pointed him to the Tower Trainers. He purchased the Tower Trainer 40 RTF package.

[link]http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXCXF4**&P=ML[/link]

He bought it before the price went up so he got it for $259, with a $20 discount from Tower. So overall cost was $239. This guy is a dentist that actually has offices in 3 different towns, so he's usually as busy as I am. We have tried for 4 weeks to get our schedules to sync up so I could help him put it together. He was VERY nervous about doing it himself so he really wanted me to be there to help putting it together. As any of you out there whio have learned to fly and relate to, he was starting to get anxious to fly his plane. We were set for last Thursday to get together on this, but I had to wait for an ATT repair tech to come over to repair a T-1 data line so I had to cancel on him. I told him to put the receiver and the transmitter on charge and we would see what we could do at the field on Saturday.

If any of you haven't seen the package, it's your standard trainer plane to start with. It comes with a Tower Hobbies 46 ABC engine (installed) and a Tower Hobbies 4 channel radio (installed also), and the radio is a remarked Futaba radio. This plane comes with the engine, server, battery, receiver, pushrods, and all control surfaces installed.

So Saturday morning rolls around. He shows up at the field and we open the box up on the tailgate of his truck. Literally, withing 30 minutes we had the entire plane assembled and sitting on a test stand breaking in the engine. We ran two tanks of fuel through it on the stand and then took it up to trim it out. He got in three good flights today before it was too hot to fly any more. So at the field in the back of a pickup truck we had his plane flying in less than an hour. Not bad, not bad indeed. I've been in this hobby for 12 years now and even I thought this was a pretty great accomplishment.

Ok, my rave is over. I just wanted to point out just how easy this plane was to assemble and get flying. Long gone are the days where pilots had to turn a box full of sticks into a flying airplane, they can now get it done in an evening. This just adds to my recommendation of the Tower Trainers.... easy to assemble, good flying, and a great price. A very nice package indeed.

Ken