New to IL2 on PS3: looking for tips

Hello! Nice to have you aboard. I have never flown sim on PC. My experience is with this game only. From what I have gathered, this game is somewhat less complicated, so to speak, than a PC. So I hope you don't get disillusioned by its faults. I wiil help as much as I can.

I use the Thrustmaster Hotas stick. It has a limited hat switch on the throttle for lookaround. Up, left, right, down. The game also supports a mouse in the 2nd port for look around and bomber gunner view. It has no limits on its range as the Hotas does. I find it impossible to find and track my target and keep my plane going where I want it to at the same time. I can't stare at my enemy and stay upright too. I don't know any of my friends that can. I use the pop up map often as we all do, realistic or not, it is your only option to locate the general vicinity of your foes. I will look left and right or up for location after getting close using the map, then turn my plane towards the enemy and look out the top of my canopy as I turn. I "sweep" the sky in an arc of about 110 degrees or so as I turn. I can control my plane in this way while searching. Once I have located my foe I will "pop" the look around in and out of his direction as I manuever into position. If I lose him, I immediately use the pop up map to track him and continuosly manuever by instinct (knowing his direction, attitude, speed, etc the last time I saw him). Once you get the enemy in front of you in site you are halfway there. Or just give up and start hunting all over again. Pilots have different methods of lookaround so I'm sure you will get other inputs, but this is my method and it works for me. Above all, practise makes perfect. You will figure it out in time.

As far as stopping, I pull all the back on the stick and stop. I believe that is the brake.

Pick out enemies by looking for the blue bands on the wings and fusalage (good guys) or red bands (bad guys). You may have a problem here because unless you are using the Sony controller or a TM stick, the zoom function does not work on custom setup (in sim mode only). An oversight on the part of the developers. Without zoom, you have to close up on your target. A pity for sure, but that's the way it is unfortunately.

I've never had a problem accepting secondary targets.

Hope to see you in the air! Just keep playing and you will get it real quick!!!!