Thats a great plan and the key to your success. Sims are also a big help and I do recomend them but cannot substitute for a mentor. I use the term mentor because it says so much more than the rather cold term instructor and says so much more about what this person will mean to you.

Concerning starter inserts the one I always recommend is the Miller blue and consistantly the best I have tried, it is far superior to the Hobbico white:

http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin...&I=LXBC72&P=RF

If one uses no spinners or spinner nuts (not recomended, by me anyway) then the Miller Pink would be the choice.

This brings us to another choice and that is to use no spinner at all but instead a spinner nut. On trainers these actually look much better than some large cheap plastic spinner. This is the only real practical choice for new folks and will save lots of lost time dickering with spinners. I am constantly held up with students wasting time on spinners and they are a big reason some don,t get to fly on some days. Real machined alum spinner nuts will match virtually any starter cone and it only takes seconds to replace a propellor (a consideration when learning). If you go this route the cone type spinner nut is preferrable to the dome shaped variety which is a vague attempt to look like a scale Hamilton Standard propeller oil dome.

http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin...&I=LXE158&P=RF

John