Okay. I’m at a computer now. I can start to answer some of these questions. Again, none of these questions are about VFR, so I will talk about VFR at the end and explain that a little.
What aircraft is this on? It could mean one of two different things, and I don’t know which one it is without a little more context:
- Alternate static source: There is a system on your aircraft called the pitot-static system. Your altimeter, airspeed indicator, and vertical speed indicator are all part of that system. All three of them require something called “static air”, and that’s ambient air that isn’t “pushed” into your aircraft by the wind (air that’s pushed into your aircraft for the pitot-static system comes through the pitot tube, and only your airspeed indicator needs that one). If your static air port were to become blocked, it’s going to throw all three of those instruments off. So having an alternate static source allows you to have a backup. Some aircraft don’t have an alternate static source. And in those situations, if you’re in an emergency, you would actually have to break the glass of one of your pitot-static instruments. People recommend the vertical speed indicator, since it’s the least important of the three.
- Carb heat: On aircraft with carbureted engines, your carburetor operates with something called a venturi, which is a narrow passage that causes the air to speed up and the air pressure to drop. If you remember your ideal gas law from high school, dropping pressure also drops temperature. So it is possible to ice up your carburetor. When ice forms in the venturi, it blocks the air from coming through it, and can lead to fuel starvation and eventually the shutdown of your engine. Turning on carb heat actually takes air from a different source that actually wraps around your exhaust manifold, warming it up. So you can actually melt off some of that ice, or better yet, prevent it from forming, by turning on your carb heat. (Doing so reduces your overall power, and this alternate air usually doesn’t pass through a filter, so that’s why you don’t leave it on all the time.)
The cover around an engine is called its cowling. Engines generate a lot of heat, and a lot of piston aircraft are cooled by air. Cowl flaps actually open up a space in your engine cowling to allow greater airflow. However, this also increases drag, so you usually don’t do this during cruise. But that’s okay, because during cruise, you’re going fast enough that air has no problem cooling it. But cowl flaps work great in a time like takeoff when you’re using high power but you’re operating at a slow speed without much airflow. In a small aircraft like a Cessna 172, the engine is sufficiently small that you don’t need cowl flaps. But even if you were to take a step up to the Cessna 182, which has a bigger engine, then you have cowl flaps.
A VOR is a ground-based antenna that broadcasts a signal in all directions that your airplane can pick up. In your aircraft, you can use one of 360 “radials” that come out of the VOR, one for every degree of a circle, to determine you are with respect to that VOR.
Actually, this is a case when I don’t need to explain too much because Captain Joe has a great video on it, which I’ve linked below. The natural question arises: Why do we need those when we’ve got GPS? A few things to know:
- The VOR system was created long before GPS was around.
- GPS is a system provided by the United States government to its military and also civilians around the world. If something horrible like a massive war were to break out, the civilian signal could potentially be turned off. Or it could be jammed by another actor.
- Even barring the awful scenario of #2, having a backup is always good.
- There are some aircraft that aren’t equipped with GPS.
Okay, here’s the video:
Distance measuring equipment. Quite often, these transmitters occupy the same space as VORs. So much so that that configuration is called VOR/DME. Their function is in the name, and they are useful in tandem with a VOR because a VOR will tell you what radial or bearing you are flying, but that information alone would not be enough to tell you where you are. You would either need a second VOR’s signal to do that or a DME. One caveat to keep in mind is that they actually measure something called “slant distance”. In your head, if you think of the distance to a DME, you’re probably thinking about the distance along the ground. However, it’s actually the distance to the DME if you were to run a piece of tape measure between the aircraft in the sky and the DME. So if you were at 6000 feet and you were to fly over a DME, the DME would tell you that you’re 1 nm away from it.
Automatic direction finder. That’s the name of the instrument in your aircraft. They use NDB (non-directional beacon) stations on the ground. (The nice thing about VORs is that your instrument is called your VOR receiver and the station is called the VOR station. You don’t have two abbreviations to worry about! 
) In your aircraft, when you tune to an NDB, your ADF points right to the NDB and you can fly to it. (Note that wind will blow you off course, and there is a technique you can follow to fix that.) NDBs don’t always work well in bad weather like thunderstorms. In the United States, they’re actually not being repaired as they break, so they are slowly being phased out. (In fact, one NDB at an airfield near to me was decommissioned a few years ago.) However, they are still being used in other places around the world.
You can use any of the navigation items mentioned above in either VFR or IFR. I had written a whole thing about VFR before when I thought that your thread was about VFR. I will copy the first paragraph of what I wrote here, to help: VFR flying means that you are flying mostly on your own separation of your aircraft from other aircraft. In IFR, your flight plan, ATC, and published procedures dictate what you should be doing. To be unambiguous: In both cases, the pilot in command (PIC) is ultimately responsible for the safety of the aircraft and everyone on board. It’s only a question of how you get from point A to point B.
I am happy to explain more about what VFR is, if that is interesting to you, although I am going away from my computer for a few days and won’t be able to type long posts like this for several days. (Also, I can only talk about it from an American perspective.) CharlieFox00 alluded to some of it, above.
Moderators are not MS or Asobo employees, so remember that this is only my opinion alone and not an “official” statement:
While IFR can be realistic in some aircraft thanks to the Working Title group, it’s not going to be realistic from an ATC point of view. Also, given where you are at right now, I think it would be best if you stayed with VFR for a while until you got comfortable.
Hope this helps!