Actually managed to cold start, take off, land on a building here and one there and then get back to the airfield and land - in my KA-50!!
Now to practice, practice, practice.
I'm still having trouble with trim though. I've assigned it a button on my X52 Pro and when I press and hold button when I think I have the right pitch and then let go, it seems to give more pitch than when I let it go...in other words the nose dips more.
So - still having trouble with trim >:(
The key to the trim seems to be that it sets itself to where the joystick is positioned, compared to being centered. In other words if you want to level out your angle of bank, don't push the joystick so far to the other side as to compensate for how much you're sliding but push it to where the joystick would normally be in relation to centered, to achieve that attitude. Does that make sense??
There was a YouTube tutorial someone made that explained this fairly easily, using the game's hotkey command that shows the joystick positioning in a little window at the bottom left corner of the screen. I don't recall the default key command but that looks like it could help you visualize how it works, too.
You may also need to zero out any deadzone setting on the joy axes, as someone mentioned that can screw with it.