Problem solved
Thanks for the screen shot. My axis control list didn't look anything like it.
Turns out I had copied my old joystick .lua into the mi-8 folder instead
of starting out with the default.lua which came with the mi-8 installation.
Thanks for the help
How can I map the collective up and down to the joystick z axis?
Currently the z axis is mapped to "thrust", but it would be much more useful to be able to control the collective with the joystick z axis.
The collective command does not appear in the "axis" category.
PROBLEM SOLVED! The windows error report created after the DCS crash mentioned something about 'headtracker.dll", so I removed headtracker.dll from the bin folder and no more crashes. I'm not sure my freetrack still works, but at least DCS does.