We're all different with difffering capacity to learn and aptitudes steered in various directions from childhood.

I've been building planes since the age of 8, but these were mostly freeflight and control line. In freeflight you build a lot because they go up up and away.....start again.

I have played sim games since the commodore 64 was around so the aptitude for flying has been built in for a long time.
In Feb this year I took up RC flying with a SAPAC Wilga. I wa told its a tail dragger, you'll never take off or land the thing without help.

well I managed, but what I also did was reinforce bad habits, and those are hard to undo.
So yeah Sims help youa lot but they also forgive bad habits which real planes don't like. Big problem.

I decided in March to take some lessons because I wanted to get a 2n opinion on techniqiue and also have someone telling me where I am going wrong and what I am doing right. 20 flights later I was a solo pilot with proficiency at Silver level. here we have Solo, Bronze, Silver, GOld, Instructor. I'm headding for gold with my stik soon.

Point is not to blow my own horn but as practical example of often what people say you should do and what you can do being vastly separated.

A structured approach is always advantageous because it allows time to correct bad habits and learn good technique and drill it in. From there, a secondplane can be anything. It just depends how willing you are to be a novice and learn learn learn on a trainer.

A bloke at my club said to me, if you can fly a trainer well and do anythin with it from rolls to loops to cuban eights, stall turns etc, ou can fly anything. The value of the trainers is you can learn all these moves with the safety of a forgving airframe thats cheap and easy to repair. It teaches you how to repair aircraft and in sme case, how not to build an aircraft when you get that far down the line.

So no matter what your aptitude for flying is, I will always recommend a trainer first and once you have mastered (and I mean mastered not just take off fly in circles and land) that, you can fly anything.

A trainer allows you to try out the characteristics of almost anything by adjusting weight, CG, wing dihedral, dar if you get a ORA Transformer you can even go from high wing to low wing in the link of an eye.

Trainer first, then the sky is your domain.

Oh, sims are good but way overated. ou simply donot get the feeling of movement that controlling a real rc plane invokes causing temporary paralysis when things go wrong. Sims are nice for learning stick actions but are pretty useless for helping you become a good pilot. To be a good pilot you need talent but mostly you need stick time.