I'd recommend starting up and taking off with radiators fully closed, but then opening them up all the way as soon as you're in the air, and then leaving them open all the time. Edit - On second thoughts, as the others have said, safer to open them right up before take-off.
After a cold start, it takes a couple of minutes to warm up the engine enough to get moving without throttling up and stalling. Having the radiators closed can speed that up. But once in the air it can take less than a couple of minutes to cook your engine if you leave the radiators fully closed.
I haven't played around with varying the radiators while flying, to try and reach and maintain maximum cruising speed for example, so I can't say what trade-offs there might be between cooling and loss of airspeed due to radiator drag in the game. Don't know what they did in real life either. All I know is, with radiators fully open, and keeping a constant watch on the boost and oil temperature gauges, overheating's never an issue for me.
Last edited by Les; 04-25-2011 at 04:53 PM.
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