Everything appears to be running right but I get to the point where the instuctor tells you to hit \ to go maximum speed. I do this, and fly around and nothing happens. I have tried starting, stopping, using after burners. The objectives still say to press \. Any ideas?

Did you customize your controls before doing this mission and changed the maximum speed button? I think there might have been a bug which would only work if you had default controls. If your controls are the default ones then I'm not sure why that would be happening.

Dealt with over the Hard Light IRC.
Issue was starting the FS2 campaign with the FSPort selected as a mod; the game can't work correctly that way.

Hmm i have the same problem and all ive done is start Fs2 through the fsopen launcher. Afaik i dont have any other mods even installed, what am i doing wrong?

Thanks, it seems that \ was just accelerating whereas ' was the max speed button that was wanted :(