So last summer I taught myself to fly RC airplanes. I started on a parkzone Ember (3 channel, fully proportional, great little plane by the way). It is nearly crashproof because its so slow and lightweight, so I didn't need an instructor. After a month or so of flying almost everyday, I could do precision landings, loops, and just about every maneuver the little plane itself was capable of. So then I decided it was time to move to bigger things. The whole reason I decided to learn to fly RC in the first place was because a relative had given me an old hangar 9 alpha trainer, 40 size nitro plane, which I wanted to fly.

With all my practice on the Ember, I was actually able to fly the Alpha without much trouble. Except for one thing. On landing, I always broke the front landing gear off. Even though my landings usually looked quite smooth, the front landing gear would still break. I would fix it, and go fly again. Of course, with the exception of the first time, this can be explained by my shoddy repair work.

So I am mostly concerned with the first landing. Since it is a trainer, you would think the alpha trainer would be built to take the hard landings student pilots would inevitably put on it. Is it normal for the nose gear to break off even on a mildly hard landing? Do student pilots regularly break the nose gear off 40 size trainers while learning to land? Because if not, then I suspect my problems were because the plane was 5 or 6 years old and the balsa was weak from having some fuel spilled on it.

Im asking because I am considering buying a new alpha trainer (I did eventually crash the old one, when the radio battery died in flight, i think. 5 year old battery too). But I would like to know that I will be able to land the new alpha, ie, that a new alpha trainer can usually take a mildly hard landing without losing its nose gear.

A few other questions, too. I usually landed with throttle at idle. However, this usually resulted in fairly high speed landings, the plane would have needed a long runway, if the nose gear hadnt broken and prevented it from rolling. Is it normal to land at idle, or do people usually kill the engine on final? Because I noticed killing the engine usually produced much more reasonable landing speeds. Then again maybe my idle was set to high.

Also, what was actually one of the hardest parts of transitioning from the ember was the takeoff roll. The plane would start to pull hard to the left at high speed and throttle. But if I trimmed this out, then it would pull to the right at low speed. (May have gotten left and right reversed there, dont remember). I konw P-factor can cause this, but the tendency seemed very strong to be P-factor alone. Is this normal? I had the luxury of a wide runway, but it seems like it would be very difficult to take off from a narrow runway due to this.

Thanks for you help!