Hi Andy! Welcome.
- You can, but if you start on the ramp, it may be cold and dark. There is a way to set one button to autostart the engines. I believe it’s CTRL+E, and I have it mapped to the engine button on my VKB Gladiator. There may be a setting to allow “cold and dark” on start-up to be toggled off. Not sure.
- Uh, checklists can be fairly long, particularly for airliners. You can always auto-complete them.
- Uh, with all of the introductory issues I’ve seen with this sim, this is one I haven’t seen yet. You’re running, checklists complete, and on advancing the throttles, your engine dies? New one on me.
- My guess is that “what’s going on here” is that you mapped your buttons to full flaps or retract flaps. There are other commands for extending flaps incrementally, or retracting them incrementally. I’d look at the various command inputs and try different throttle quadrant mapping.
Good luck.