I've flown the one called the "Four Star Bird". It is actually a knock of the Great Planes Rapture .40 which is only available in kit form. They copied it all the way down to the covering scheme used on the kit box photo. It actually flew pretty well, very similar in fact to the actual Rapture kit that I'd built a few years previous. Quality was so-so. The landing gear wire was soft as butter and the guy had to replace a lot of hardware and do a little re-engineering to get it all to fit together well. The covering was also lousy and peeled off in fairly short order. I always thought "Chinakote" was a derogatory term used to describe bad covering.

Anyhow, the plane had some flaws but you have to remember that it was dirt cheap. It is a matter of what you are willing to accept and fix in order to save a few dollars. I'm also certain that there would be zero service after the sale if the plane were somehow defective. One advantage of buying form a reputable company is that good service.

My biggest issue is that they are copies. I don't buy this "they are made in the same factory" stuff. It is very easy to copy something these days. Unscrupulous manufacturers in China and other places do it all the time. They even do it to the reputable Chinese companies. Unfortunately these copy-cats do not have any of the R&D costs or anything else associated with having an original product. It is wrong in my opinion to do this.

I'm not knocking Chinese-made ARF's. Pretty much all of them come from there and that's fine; they'd be too expensive otherwise. With the reputable companies designing and importing planes though, you get good instructions, good hardware, better covering, support after the sale and hopefully some sort of morals that prevent them from blatantly stealing designs owned by others. There are good Chinese companies too such as World Models too; it's not just the American, Japanese and European companies that are reputable. My concern is with the bad ones, wherever they happen to be from.