I just bought this game, and it's awesome! However, I have a few questions about it.

First of all, for some reason, there are no icons above friendly or enemy planes. I made sure that "No HUD icons" is turned off, but I still can't see any icons above the planes.

Second, when I'm flying a mission, the flight leader sometimes gives the vector and altitude. I understand that the vector is the degrees from north that we are going, but I don't understand the altitude that they give. It's usually something like "Altitude 05" or something, but I don't know what that means...

Thanks for the help!

Well for the second thing on icons, have you went to Controls, click QMB, look at the bottom and click on the Difficulty button, then the next screen click on maps/icons. At the bottom are three buttons, Easy, Normal, Realistic. Click on one of them to see if the icon lights up.
That may be it. I have mine set easy myself.

Altitude 05 is 5000 feet. To find out go to your controls and set your 'Toggle Speedbar' to a hotkey, this changes the metric to standard measurements. Then you'll know for sure.

Hope this helps.

~S~