Sky Trainer 182 1100mm PNP - Overview

The looks are great, beautiful color and scale looks.  Once you get it in the air, after many difficulties, it flies very scale. But...
1)  Nose gear broke before it even got off the ground.  Unless you fly off a very smooth, even polished surface, the front gear will break.  I was flying off a reasonably smooth country road and the gear broke before the plane even left the ground.  Had to replace it with a self-made more solid gear and used larger wheels  2) after installation of a new landing gear, and replacing the small wheels by larger ones (which gives the plane a less scale look, but at least I could taxi on the ground with it), I had a first beautiful flight and landing.  Flight time appr. 5-6 minutes on a 1300mah 2S battery.  During the second flight, the left aileron servo stopped working.  I was hardly able to control the plane using rudder, but the tree could not be avoided... fortunately damage was limited to a crack on the wing, which could be repaired.
3) Overall, the plane is very nose heavy.  Battery has to be placed as far back as possible in the very small compartment. And even then, I had to add some weight on the back to get a reasonable CG.  Flying with flaps is very scale, only minor elevator mix required.
4) After the aileron servo disfunction mentioned above, I replaced all servos by new ones, metal gear servos.  Only kept the flap servos, those being less critical.  On the 8th flight, the horizontal stabilizer unglued from the fuselage during a loop and the plane crashed nose first into the ground... not good.  Wings broke out of the fuselage on top the cabin, pulling the plastic screw bracket out of the foam, Front cabin pillars broke, the motor mount broke, motor shaft is bent...  I will not go through the effort to repair this, which will only weaken the plane even more.

As conclusion, while great looking plane, nice scale flying once you have balanced out the heavy nose with aft weights, the construction has too many weaknesses.  The front gear is definitely too weak for the heavy nose, and the horizontal stabilizer system being glued on rather than held by screws is too weak for anything more than scale flying.  The servos are unreliable and need to be changed.  There is only little place to fit anything more than a receiver, forget about an additional/separate gyro stabilizer.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this plane to anyone, too many flaws and weak construction.  It is definitely NOT a beginner plane and a more advanced flyer who would be able to balance it properly and do the required mods may get bored with simple scale flying, which is really the only thing that this plane can take given the weak construction.