ORIGINAL: steelyphil
Even though the glow engine ones are trainers I still think it would be a bad choice for me to have an expensive powerful plane when I have zero experience handling it. The thing I'm most scared of is when the plane turns around I wont be able to control it if its flying at me because the command swill be backwards and It will most likely crash. If I get a foam electric and can get the basic feel of it and then later when I can fly in circles and land and do all that I can get something I wont crash in the first 20 seconds of flying.
Precisely the reason that working in club evironment with a mentor instructor in general offers the least expensive and trouble free path to the airmanship you dream about. As so carefully outlined in beau's excellent and well thought out post above.
The majority of our new members these days seem to come from failed park flyers flying alone who have gone throught six, seven or more airplanes without ever having acquired any more skills or knowledge than when they started. Of these folks many convert to glow and never look back with a smaller number staying with electric and thats great to.
John