The views are counter intuitive, but with some work you'll get to use them fine. The most important thing is to go into the keyboard mapping. You'll notice some important items are not mapped to any key. Like 'virtual cockpit' or 'front view' or whatever it's called. There are many keys that we don't use anymore (b for brakes, for example) so I've grabbed some of them for things we do use. I have done pretty extensive re-mapping and it works much better for me now.
Virtual cockpit = F1
Spot view = F2
Chase View = F3
Cycle View = F4
HUD = F5
Float view = F6
Goto Gunner = F9
Goto Pilot = F10
Flyby = F11
Player/target = F12
Lables = L
Screenshot = P
Target friend = F
Prev friend = Shift + F
Stop Engine = B (that's mixture idle cutoff)
Ctl-Shift-I = brackets (that's an interesting key, try it when you have a target selected
Read the sticky on OFF: Tips and Cheats. You won't get the padlock working without a good understanding of the TAC screen. You have to select a target to be able to padlock it.
There are 'snap' views and I believe you can change them to PAN by holding scroll-lock, but I'm not sure how that works (I'm a 'snap' view kinda guy, so I don't mess with scrolling). Go to the keyboard controls in the game, see what's there. Right down things you want. Delete things you don't. Experiment, experiment, experiment.