Apprentice
The E-flite Apprentice — Horizon Hobby's iconic ready-to-fly foam trainer that has put more new pilots in the air than almost any other aircraft in the hobby's modern era.
About
The E-flite Apprentice is one of the most successful beginner-foamy trainers ever produced. E-flite is a Horizon Hobby brand built around foam ready-to-fly aircraft for the entry-level and intermediate market, and the Apprentice line has been the brand's flagship trainer for the better part of two decades. Like every well-loved foam trainer, the Apprentice earns its place in the hobby by being three things at once: light enough to fly slowly, tough enough to survive the inevitable hard landings of an absolute beginner's first weekends, and simple enough to take out of the box and have flying the same afternoon.
The design recipe is the modern foam trainer template. High wing for self-righting stability, generous dihedral, flat-bottomed airfoil for predictable stall behavior, and bright high-visibility livery for orientation at altitude. The brushless electric powerplant runs quietly and reliably without the fuel-mixture and starting drills of a glow engine, and a small lithium-polymer battery delivers reliable flight times. The later "Apprentice S" variant added SAFE flight stabilization technology — automatically panic-recovery to wings-level when the pilot pushes a button — that effectively eliminated the most common beginner-pilot crashes.
The Apprentice is widely credited as one of the airframes that opened RC flying to a new generation of pilots in the 2000s and 2010s, replacing the old "join a club, find an instructor, build a balsa trainer" pathway with a simpler "buy the box, fly the same afternoon" approach.
In the simulator
The friendly entry point for new RC pilots. The Apprentice flies the way a beginner aircraft should — slow, predictable, generous on the controls, and self-righting when you let go of the sticks. Use it to learn the four core skills: coordinated turns, pattern flying, takeoff trim, and recovery from unusual attitudes. A natural sibling of the EasyStar (CV Planes Pack 2) and HZ Super Cub (CV Planes Pack 4) — three foundation foam trainers in the broader catalog.
