Howdy.
Feeling more than slightly stupid about this, and I remember having the same problem as a kid back in the day, but I can't get the aircraft off the carrier. The Max Pwr control as presented in the technical supplement doesn't help me. I've tried out the combinations I can think of but can't just figure this one out.

How'd you guys get it off the air?

did you disengage the brakes?

This is easy to fix and a well known bug of the game. The game requires a US keyboard layout loaded, otherwise you can't run the engines. It doesn't work with other language keyboard layouts loaded.

In DOS days you just entered the command "keyb.exe us" in the command shell.

In DOSBox you have two options.
You can either edit the config file of DOSBox and setup the correct keyboad layout right from the beginning OR if DOSBox is running, you just enter the above "keyb us" DOS command with " us" as layout parameter.

For more informations you can take a look here:
https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/KEYB