Allow freelook while in home cockpit mode

Microsoft Flight Simulator Wishlist
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Home cockpit mode is a camera setting that is supposed to make the virtual cockpit disappear. It doesn’t. But that’s what it’s supposed to do. It also apparently prevents you from using freelook.

I think that the people who designed this feature had cockpit builders with full cockpits with wraparound screens solely in mind. For those people, maybe freelook would not be necessary. But there are many people who operate with an instrument panel and single monitor in front of them. And there may be many people who aren’t cockpit builders who simply liked the “W” key from FSX and want to fly without an instrument panel. For those people, disabling freelook means that you can’t look anywhere but straight ahead.

Looking around is necessary for avoiding runway/taxiway incursions at the airport, answering traffic alerts from ATC (especially when ATC tells you that you have traffic at your 6 o’clock :smile:), collision avoidance in the air, and for VFR pilots who need to look around in the pattern/circuit.

Furthermore, I’ll add: If you do a search on “home cockpit mode” in the forums, you’re going to find several threads with people who say that freelook stopped working on them, only to discover that home cockpit mode was turned on, preventing them from using freelook. I don’t think it’s most people’s expectations that enabling home cockpit mode is also going to disable freelook, too. (Freelook doesn’t even get disabled in the menus when you enable home cockpit mode.)

It’s for these reasons that I ask the developers to consider decoupling these two settings from each other so that you can still do freelook while in home cockpit mode.

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Many people including myself are struggling with views outside the aircraft that are necessary to navigate especially on t/o and landing and with fast moving aircraft. While head tracker IR and virtual reality headsets are possibilities, they are not supported by MSFS on XBox. Try flying a landing pattern with a BF 109 as opposed to a C152 - easy to loose the airport or turn to final too soon or too late. My work around involves the POI capability in MSFS. When within 5 miles of an airport, the POI becomes the airport. I have a keybinding for “toggle POI” and can hit it while in the pattern to show me the airport. If you are flying a low wing aircraft that is a fast mover and having to make a steep bank, the POI will still point to the airport out the top of the canopy at the airport. Not perfect but it does work - most of the time. My suggestion to Asorbo for improvement would be to allow some configuration changes such as making the default POI the airport and somehow making it the runway threshold you are headed for rather than trying to designate threshold.
While this may be a good starting point, certain procedures will eventually require VR or at least the inclusion of tracker IR. For example carrier landings are nearly impossible (at least for me) without constant situation awareness and the 3D capability of VR. Same for Helicopters where judging exactly how high above the ground you are is important to say nothing of landing a fast tail dragger on a short field.