Just try facetracknoir to find out, if such a method is handy for u in general. It is not a longterm solution, because it needs some cpu load and sometimes do not track correctly, because it has to use not only its program, but also freetrack or something like that to emulate for the game.
I personally started with freetrack and a selfmade usb-»ir led construction and a normal webcam, as I prefer active infrared transmitting instead of reflecting signals.
It works, but the field of view of my webcam soon limited the fun. So, I finally bought trackir and I will never play without it anymore. I am simply too stupid to mive camera in the pi with a hat or buttons (except zoom, i still use HATS on my joystick for it.
Nevertheless, you must know, that switching to gunsight mode with shift+f1 are causing a limited view to the sides (depending on zoom factor). If you zoom in in this mode, you are simply not able to look around. They tried to simulate the viewing angle, when a pilot sits closely in front of the gunsight. But most of the people think, that this behaviour is not handy and not really helpful.
If you mean this case, you should leave a voting in the il2bugtracker. I opened a request for it, to take out this limitation, as especially pilots of some german planes like bf 109 have some major disadvantages, because the have no centered gunsight and in free view mode, they will have to lean to the right to look through it, while spitfire pilots can look through it without this problem. It is simply some kind of nonsense.
So @ all: please vote for it!
You can find it under: ticket #87: gunsight view and free view are difficult to switch....
I wonder, why "viewing when parachuting" has more votes!
I think, that this viewing problem is an essential one! So please vote