The Horizontal Situation Indicator (HSI) is driven by a gyroscope (that is why it's sometimes called a Directional Gyroscope), which is subject to gyro drift: the indicator will drift from its current heading and must be periodically (every ~15 minutes) calibrated to agree with the magnetic compass heading.The Vertical Speed Indicator (VSI) is also subject to error.This is not a malfunction (more on this.) Compass turning error: A compass, when subjected to the forces of flight, tends to turn in the opposite direction for a brief period before settling on the correct heading.'Left turning syndrome' for the previously mentioned reasons.Here are some of the FlightGear realism points, which may be confusing to first time pilots:
To fix the problem, you have to download scenery, which can be done by manually downloading the appropriate scenery, automatically downloading the scenery for the airport by enabling TerraSync by selecting 'Download scenery automatically' from the 'Downloads' section of the 'Settings' menu of the Flightgear launcher, using the graphical Java-based tool TerraMaster (requiring the Java SE Runtime Environment) to download the appropriate scenery, or obtaining the necessary scenery also available for purchase on Blu-ray from the FlightGear store. If the tutorial starts without a runway and surrounded by water, your setup of Flighgear is missing the scenery for the airport at which the tutorial was supposed to run. You can access tutorials by going to the 'Help' menu and selecting 'Tutorial.' A great place to start is the tutorial for the Cessna 172p aircraft, commonly used in real life to learn to fly fixed-winged aircrafts.
With tutorials, you can learn to operate particular aircrafts but also learn to fly.