Amazing technlology for cheap

[Avalon]

That plane looks great! I tried building/flying a gas powered RC plane 20 years ago. I had zero ability to fly the thing - I found it very difficult to manipulate the controls correctly when the plane wasn't flying directly away from me.

Now I wonder if having the auto-land and panic recovery features would be enough for me to be able to learn to actually control the plane... Hmm...

This is fairly common I believe. Before the days of computer simulators, a tip my son used to show student pilots was to rotate their body away from the plane (in the direction of the turn) as it was making it's turn. IOW, as the plane started flying back toward the pilot, he would almost be facing away from it and looking back over his shoulder slightly. This gave the sensation of being behind the plane.
Another way to describe this is to keep the transmitter antenna generally pointed in the plane's direction of travel.
An oddity we noticed was that novice pilots had much more difficulty with right hand turns than left hand turns.

"Buddy cords", linking the student's and instructor's transmitters were the safest and most efficient method of learning in those pre simulator days. A flip of a switch sent the controls from student to instructor at the instructor's command.