I speak as novice with about four months total experience with helicopters. I started with the mcx and moved up the CX3. I see E-Flite as a company that provides <u>acceptable</u>, not perfect aircraft to the masses. They and others have gone a long way towards making r/c flight <u>affordable</u> to a lot of people who otherwise would have simply passed the hobby by. The key term is <u>affordable</u>. As I understand it, part of the learning curve with many helicopters is the "quality control-repair-upgrade" phase. You have to be prepared to do your own crashing, learning, fixing and tweaking. This is called "fun".There are significant by-products of this process. The entire Internet support community isa tremendous by-product. Another is the after-market for just about any helicopter outthere. Yes, acompany like E-flite will cause its share of frustrations, annoyances and rants.I know I have had mine. At the same time, they allow you to gain and sharealevel of proficiency and expertise. Just look at the size of the knowledge basefor most manufacturers on this web site alone.

Coming from a perspective of over twenty years in the personal computer field I can say that things always get better. Sometimes it is a slow process but it always happens. I strongly suspect with the rapid advances being made in very energy efficient, tinymicroprocessors and solid state drive devices, in five years or so we will have r/c helicopters that have autopilots. Then we will be saying "I remember when we had to do trim adjustments manually while our helicopters were in the air in a 15 mph head wind." Hang in there.

I am now looking at moving up to my next helicopter. I have looked at the Thunder Tiger Innovator MD530, the Blade 400 and the Trex 450. Right now, the Trex 450 looks good <u>after</u> I put in some serious simulator time. Time is on my side and the products will just keep getting better.