Your assumptions are spot on.
I wanted to get into flying RC planes, but I keep thinking about what happened when my dad tried it. He had worked with a guy who'd been flying for a while, and was fairly comfortable with it, as long as the guy was nearby to help.
I was home one leave, and my dad decided he wanted to try flying it by himself. We went out to do so. He got it in the air okay, and it was flying well for a short while, then he lost all communication with it (we determined the receiver lost battery power).
It turned hard one direction, then nosed in for the last couple of hundred feet while at full throttle.
It took us a while, but we finally spotted the tail of it sticking up out of a wheat field nearby.
The nose was buried up to the windshield, the wing had snapped the rubber bands holding it on, and the poor little plastic pilot was decapitated.
He built a second plane, but never flew it and wound up selling it years later.
With a helicopter, I'm less worried about my pilot's little head, an much more worried about my own. ;-)