Salinas Hawk,

I believe the more improtant question here is why would you (or anyone else) choose to try to teach themselves to fly R/C when they belong to and presumably have the considerable resources of a great club available to them to effectively teach them to fly?????

Join in!!!! People will be glad to help you learn. I guarantee it. Also, as someone pointed out, you can buddy box with modern radios with any combination of modes you want. 1 can teach 2; 2 can teach 1; 2 can teach 2; 1 can teach 1. So, if you want an instructor, your mode choice can be independent of the mode the instructor flies. Neat!

If you go it alone, I predict that (1) you will destroy a lot of airplanes; (2) endanger those around you; (3) spend a lot of unnecessary money and (perhaps more importantly) time building and rebuilding planes; (4) will get fed up and quit before ever learning to fly successfully. I have seen this happen.

I have been flying Mode 1 for 35 years. It is obviously the best way to fly (OK, that is just my opinion!) I have also done some full scale flying in the past, and I can assure you that your RC mode will have no impact on your actions, reactions, or thinking in the cockpit of a full scale. As others have pointed out, to two activities and their controls are just too different to have much correlation. I think being an R/C flyer will help you understand the dynamics of full scale flight however.

I taught a Navy OCS candidate (will be flight training this year) to fly R/C last year, and he concurs that the experience has started him on his way. Although he was a newly minted aerospace engineer (I am an aero engineer too, but far from newly minted) he says that learning to fly has reinforced practically what he learned in the classroom. I told him it would before we started. By the way, I taught him to fly Mode 2 from my Mode 1 transmitter via the buddy box. Worked great!

DON'T GO IT ALONE. There is no good reason to do it and many good reasons to use an instructor.

Randy L