RC Helicopter vs RC Planes

How important is it to find an expert to set up the pitch and balance?
Like I said, I had someone who was good, give it a test flight, mainly to see if it would explode in mid air. He trimmed it out for me and flew it all around fast and slow, but I eventually had to re-trim it anyways after I added the training gear. Make sure to buy a balancer and a pitch gauge, you want errors to be less than 1 degree, and the balance of the blades to be perfectly level / even.

Can you set it up yourself, if you are careful
Extremely careful. I put the blade holders on upside down, but it seems to fly ok with them that way. When I get some extra money I'll buy new wood blades. Just follow the entire manual to the 't' Don't get all excited when the heli is all put together, you still have many hours of configuring / balancing / and adjusting everything.

If you want to fly with the airplanes (which they tend not to like, when you hover all over the runway) you will need AMA insurance. If you don't fly on an AMA sanctioned field AMA insurance ($60 / yr) still has many benefits, theft insurance to name one. ...and so long as you follow all the AMA guidelines when flying at a park or school, you are covered there too, incase the unimaginable happens and someone gets hurt. However, it does not cover your family though..

RC Planes are nice in that, they're much more relaxing to fly than a RC Helicopter, but the coordination you learn from flying RC planes is not so useful when flying RC Helicopters that it warrants buying a whole airplane first. The reason is because RC planes do not sit still and move backwards or sideways on you, and RC Helicopter are much less forgiving of mistakes that on an airplane could be fixed simply by pulling up and adding throttle.

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