I've flown R/C aircraft for the last 20 years. Gliders, Prop, and Helicopters. I also have R/C sailboats, electric and gas boats, and about 12 ground vehicles from Formula 1 to Off road Rally to trophy trucks, oh and a tank.
If anyone tells you that quality simulators don't work for beginners, they're lying. Fidelity and graphics are of course a plus but what a simulator will teach you is how to instinctively reorient your control inputs when the aircraft is flying away from you to when it is flying toward you and all variances of angles inbetween. It will teach you how to continuously maintain your model's intended flight path as the aircraft's bearing to your eyeline changes, something that you don't have to consider when you are flying a real aircraft and something that will pay huge dividends the first time you find yourself lining up for your first landing.
If you're just starting out, avoid scale military prop aircraft. Even with modifications to their wing planforms to make them "easier" to fly they are still more difficult to fly than a dedicated trainer aircraft (which look like hell but are the ticket if you're just starting out) Trainers are also much cheaper and can be crashed many times and easily repaired. I had a coroflyer trainer which was basically made out of corrugated plastic sheets and I took that to the field constantly because there was always someone who "wanted to try flying" that plane was probably crashed two dozen times. often very hard.
What crashes most planes in the beginning is that "brain fart" moment when you have to think about right now being left and vice versa and everything inbetween as the model changes aspect to you. It makes people laugh, but when they ask me what good training for R/C planes is I tell them, "Drive R/C cars for a little while first
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If you're just starting out, a moderately sized flat bottom dihedral high wing trainer is the way to go. They're slow, sluggish and have good lift which means they fly slow and land slow. I've landed a high wing trainer in a stiff headwind and it basically motored straight down onto its landing gear like a harrier jumpjet
As you become more advanced, you move to semi symmetrical to symmetrical wings which are more suited to aerobatics (inverted flight, perfect rolls, etc) because they have nearly equal lift inverted as they do in normal flight. This also means they have to fly much faster to stay airborne and have much higher landing speeds. They are also twitchier, do not self recover from a bank, and require a more deft hand at the controls.
They're used to be a premiere R/C simulator that allowed you to use your own radio (a good thing) with an interface to your computer. It was called Reflex but is no longer made
In its place I think that the RealFlite software is excellent though I have not used it in some time. It's probably gotten much better since the last I saw it.
Using some kind of training software program if you intended to fly helicopters used to be a given until the advent of the micro to medium sized electrics. With these "relatively" inexpensive helos you can get past your half dozen newbie crashes without breaking the bank of totaling your Raptor .90 which would cost several hundred dollars minimum to repair.
I'm partial to gas, but electric park flyers are fun to and you WILL learn a lot from flying those, though I find them a little less than exciting. you might also want to take a look at gliders if you don't mind hurling your building effort off a cliff hoping for good results
