This could very well be normal behaviour for prop driven planes. Have you trimmed the plane?

Yes I trim but it seems very excessive as I fly real aircraft and never do they need so much trim to obtain level flight.

The flight characteristics are way different between the patch and the un patched version.

Well I think I'll give up on the sim. Sad to little too late imo. Pastel colors in cockpit and everywhere basically, shades/shadows are light grays ( up high should be quite contrasted ) and horrible white wash props with some kind of lines once every 1/2 second, trims to frequently etc.. FM well not on the mood to even talk about this. I really do not know who are the advisers but .. not good enough. It make me think of a bad moder version with a almost new IL2 FB engine.
Harsh words but for years on waiting for this very anticipated and much discussed IL2 series.. Yeas well worth the words for now.

I feel your pain but I will not give up on the sim.
I finally got ARF crossfire profile to work with vsync
using radeon pro to get good fps. I am currently having a hell of time
mapping my TM Warthog. Also waiting for the Desatersoft
missions pack to finish updating.

If only I could get my clicker on a working link to sound mods.

I think flying a 1100HP fighter plane vs a 250-400HP civilian cessna or similiar is very different. The trim characteristics are good from what I can see. They fly pretty straight and level at cruise power and pitch for me. Sure they want to roll and pitch up under max power but they are high performance aircraft (for the time of course) Having said that I do think that the trim was porked a couple of patches ago in 1946! ;)

Cessna's are a stable aircraft though, while WWII warbirds weren't, they're unstable.
The difference, if I understand correctly, is a stable aircraft will pretty much find its own level flight (for instance, after a wind gust, speed change etc), ie it will return to trimmed flight of its own accord, whereas an unstable aircraft will continue porpoise about getting more away from level flight (trimmed flight) with each porpoise

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed its slightly easier to spot planes now in this patch. At all distances, and over water or land but particularly over land. Is it my imagination or am I just getting used to it???

Divergent oscillation would be deemed an unacceptable trait in any aircraft - having 'flown the phugoid' myself it needs all sorts of negative conditions (flap/undercarriage etc.) to provoke and is part of assessing an aircraft type's fitness to fly.

The old BE2s were so inherently stable as to be dangerous for exactly the opposite reason - called the 'clutching hand' by the poor sods that had to fly them.

My experience with the latest patch is the aircraft feels resonably 'real' - I had to apply some rudder trim to the Hurri which I'd never had to do before, but once set it was 'hands-off' stable.

CoD is working a bit better for me now. Whilst the framerate was sometimes great and sometimes awful I noticed this started to happen with other games. I have a friend who also had a 560 (I have 460) had similar problem. If you are using Nvidia, keep drivers up to date (fixed it for him).

What fixed it for me though was flashing the BIOS on my graphics card, gigabyte had a new one out. This meant that sometimes the card was running in 2D mode to save power and not flicking back to 3D mode. I have seen other forum posts about this and may be a problem with other newer NVIDIA cards, especially Gigabyte ones. It is a noticeable problem- you will sometimes get 60fps in a game then after leaving your PC and another game you might only get a jerky 30 fps. A reboot means the game will run at 60fps again. I think it is fixed now, haven't had the problem recently.
WARNING: Flashing a BIOS can brick your card and make it completely unusable. Only try if you know what you are doing.

Well CTD are back more often than before, the autopop tree is uggly (i dare not imagine a sequel with an IL2 flying low) and last but not least no way to graduate the stick and the rudder pedals.. i spent, no sorry, i wasted hours to test all the tricks on this forum and internet for nothing...
Conclusion : you had already killed my faith in the team, you're killing my patience. Back to the latest official version.