High Expectations for Remote Control Airplane

This weekend, we went to the park to try out my son's Radio Control Air Surfers Plane. We've never had a remote control plane before, so the anticipation was high.

Assembly must have been pretty easy, because the kids did it themselves without asking for my help. The charger, powered by 'C' batteries, took an agonizing 25-30 minutes to fully charge the small battery for the plane. Actually, 25 minutes is pretty reasonable, but for the kids it seemed like forever.

Finally, charging finished and we made our way to the park to try it out. It took us a few attempts to figure out how to get the plane flying, but we eventually got the hang of it. The problem really was that, by the time my son started to get the hang of it -- the batteries were exhausted. This only took about 5 minutes!

It was pretty frustrating to only be able to fly for five minutes. Since we had brought the charger with it, we recharged for 25 minutes and then tried again. My son was able to fly for short distances, but always resulted in a fairly quick crash. This time the charge lasted a bit longer (maybe 7 minutes), but all in all, disappointly quickly.

To make matters worse, my son refused to let my daughter give the plane a spin until the batteries were almost exhausted, and this resulted in screaming fights between the two of them for most of the time that we were there.

Keep in mind that it's entirely possible that we just don't know what we are doing. Perhaps someone with more patience, or better yet -- skill -- could do better with this plane!