I must disagree with you on the external view being realistic AND that you lose situational awareness even if you use TrackIR. I dont have TrackIR, but even with my joystick's hatswitch, I can keep track on stuff happening around me quite well. Heck, I could even go as far as saying that with or without TrackIR when external views are disabled, we still have better situational awareness than what the pilots had in real life. Our windshield is always clean, we arent tired, the weather, even in worst case is rather good in terms of visibility, we see the enemy as a black dot in the distance, no matter if he has a perfect camoscheme against the sky, we hear the enemy's engine when they are close and the list goes on. You need to remember that most of the downed pilots never saw nor heard it's hunter. Heck, if you ask me, I'd like to have even more limited views on IL2, for example not be able to look so easily to the back in certain planes (109 for example with it's very small cockpit).
Just my 2 cents on this.
