Thanks for your comments Macademic!
CoD only has three zoom settings and no seamless change in the degree of zoom. I really need the zoomed-in view for shooting, so there is unfortunately no way around the jumps in zoom setting.
It annoys me a lot that I cannot set two buttons on my joystick to "zoom in" and "zoom out". Preferably smooth zooming in and out, but if not then at least jumping from one zoom setting to another. As it is, I have to make do with fully zoomed in on one button and medium zoom on another. Fully zoomed out I can only get via the keyboard! (Because I don't want to dedicate three buttons on my stick to the three zoom settings) - Quite galling really, because it is a step BACK from Il-2 Classic, where I had a zoom in/zoom out function.
Yeah, the fly-by views can be discussed. I didn't have them in my first couple of movies, but choose them for the later ones, to give some visual interest to the more quiet periods of the movies. I love them visually, but the fly-by sounds (except on the newly made Tiger Moth) are really quite bad, obvious place-holders. I'll probably stick with them, but I totally see that there can be different points of view (sic...) about such views, since they do indeed take you "out of the cockpit".
So you are in Malta? - I love that country! Have a photo gallery from Malta here, if you're interested:...
http://dalsgaard.eu/2009-08.Malta/2009-08.01.Malta.html