ORIGINAL: Carevin

So I've always been interested in rc planes since I was young. I've watched a AMA member who is the head of the local rc plane club in my area fly. I used to do computer work for their office and he seemed like a rather cool guy. Later I found out about his plane hobby and decided to go watch him fly at a local field during our lunch breaks. This was quite a few years ago and for one reason or another I never had time/bothered/whatever to get into this back then. I've always wanted a plane and this brings us to the current. My girlfriend got me one for xmas this year. She got the Hobbico NexStar(gas) with AFS of which I'm not allowed to open until I get off for xmas. I went ahead and ordered some other things that I figured would be needed. It looks like basically I'll be all set come time to use it. I took the time to also purchase RealFlight5.

I've played games since Atari when I was little and most of this flight stuff is second nature growing up with MS flightsim and what not on the computer. So I guess I'm not really doing that bad with realflight so far. I still run into the ''plane is flying towards me but I do the wrong direction thing'' ever so often. Flying away from me is pretty natural from the years of gaming. So far I've got about 5 hours in on it and I can land the NexStar without much issue. So basically I've got alot of questions and hope I can get alot of these answers I'm looking for. I also took the time to read gettingairborne.com. I already knew alot of this stuff from my years of being interested and doing some research. Some stuff like prop pitch and a few others were welcomed though and overall I plan to read it over when I before I open up my plane.

So one of the problems I seem to have with RF5 is I can't judge the alignment of the plane when it's coming in or flying by the runway. I know it's basically ''sorta'' parallel to the runway or sorta aligned for a landing. But I can be off by probably as much as 20 degrees. Which to me seems pretty huge when you want to land IRL on say a road. Is this just a issue of computer games and should I expect to have a much better feel when flying the actual plane? I imagine I will, but really I have no experience at this. Most sims or games you are either the center focus in a 3rd person view or are behind the wheel so to say. Watching something move towards me in the air while the camera slowly rotates is a new experience.

Overall how ''close''? is RF5 going to be to actually flying this plane. I guess I should note that I've been flying it on advanced and also with AFS off on the NexStar. I subscribe to the sink or swim learning theory. So I started with it being on advanced as to not cheapen the learning experience since I've already been introduced to ''flight'' in computer games/sims. So in another month I'm guessing I'll be pretty adept in flying quite a few planes in RF5. Is this the type of thing where if I can fly it well in RF5 I'll fly decent IRL, or are these basically apples and oranges. The thing I don't want to do is waste the time and money I'm putting in this hobbie.

I was reading also about good habits and bad forming from RF5 and people treating it more as a game than what it really is as a simulator. What are all the things I should be doing to form good real life habits? What extra do people do to check their planes before they fly etc? Is there a list of steps somewhere? I'm guessing the general check flaps etc etc. But I'm sure I probably don't even know 50% of what I should be checking or doing to form these ''good habits'' that will keep my plane flying rather than malfunctioning in the air. I don't want this first post going on to long, which it already is. So I'm just going to see what type of responces I get and go from there and ask questions as they come up!