I noticed there was no good guide for setting this up.
You have several controls under Cockpit Camera. The ones you want to set are:
- Cockpit View X Translation Axis (strafing)
- Cockpit View Z Translation Axis (forward/back)
- Cockpit View Yaw Axis (turning)
- Cockpit View Pitch Axis (look up/down)
- Cockpit Camera Height Inc (move up)
- Cockpit Camera Height Dec (move down).
Each of these has a LOCKABLE version and I recommend setting those to your desired keys/buttons.
Note, they will not work properly unless you do some more steps:
Firstly, to keep it simple, you can go to Settings > General Settings > Camera and Enable Home Cockpit Mode. This will activate all of the above controls.
To do it without pausing and going to settings, you need to set two more bindings: Toggle Cockpit Freelook, and Toggle Instrument View 1.
Note: Toggle Instrument View Freelook doesn’t work, neither do Next/Previous Instrument View
The work flow is like this. When you are ready, and the plane is level or the autopilot is on, press the button to Toggle Cockpit Freelook. You’ll note the translate keys are now activated (if you didn’t set Lockable keybinds, they are always active), but the Yaw and Pitch are not. To do that, you just need to click the Toggle Instrument View 1 button. It will then go into Instrument View mode and now all the controls are available and you can walk round your plane in first person mode!
Note, had you set this to the non-lockable versions, it will always work. You might not want to do this because you might want to share keybings for cockpit movement with controling the plane!
To deactivate this mode (for those who selected the Lockable versions of the keybinds), hit the Toggle Cockpit Freelook button again. You’ll be able to resume control of the plane without these keys interfering with plane controls.