I went solo after my first day of training with my duraplane trainer 40. I was doing touch and go's on the first day with about 6 flights and a guy who was not a trainer but did a good job of training. I did put a lot of hours on my g2 sim while building my plane and I think it helped greatly. I now have about 100 flights in and own 6 planes and am working on building a taildragger trainer to learn how to fly those. The best advise I could give is to give it time and don't rush it. Its not a race to see who can crash first. The only reason I was doing solo on my second day is because nobody was at the field when I got there and had about 3 hours of flight time to myself before anyone showed up. By then I think I had about 5 or 6 flights in and was feeling good about landing (which sorta helps the nervs a little bit).

Dave

Oh, and the 3 crashes I had were all due to wind so practice with some windy conditions on the sim before trying it on a breezy day.

Dave

My son and I soloed today. We started traing last Monday We had three flights on Monday, and 4 each Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and Friday, and 1 flight this morning before our solo's.

each flight was 20 minutes long consisting of at least 40 landings per flight, followed by a climb to the cloulds, run the engine dry, loop and roll for awhile then do a dead stick landing to finish the session

we flew a Hobbico Nexstar [with the auto pilot thingie turned unplugged] a Thunder Tiger 40 with a OS .46 LA engine and a Sig Kadet with a OS .91 My son soloed on the Thunder Tiger and I soloed with the Sig.

We used about 3 gallons of fuel

we did not use buddy boxes, we used Kinesthetic Instruction, our instructor is Ray Smith of Hobbies Aloft
We both played with the Nexstar simulator and the full version of the same simulator

Dan

took me about 12 flights over 6 weeks

about 2 gallons of fuel

I fly the Alpha .40 with a tt pro .46 and 30% fuel

I used FMS a little

I soloed on my seventh or eighth flight, late Feb. early Mar. Was on the first
gal. of fuel, I'm now working on my tenth gal... I soloed with my Avistar/LA-46..
No simulator... Wait a min. I did use the free sim., RC Sim.. It was not very
good and I was using the key board.. So it did not help me stick wise, But it
did help me in plane orientation... Another thing that helped me was the clubs
training tapes and changing from a thumb to finger pinch on the sticks. My
first evaluation flight was BAD!! After playing with the sim. and watching the
tapes.. My trainer said it's like night then day on my second flight on the club
trainer..

... The tapes got me to face the direction the plane was flying so that I'd move
the sticks the direction I wanted the plane to go:-)

ah 1.....ah 2.....ah 3.. *crunch*

It takes THREE licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop.....

i flew solo on my first flight,where i fly the instructors throw you in at the deep end,no buddy box or nothing,they just get you nice and high and keep a very good eye on you whilst waiting to grab the tranny,it's a steep learning curve but it works.