Originally posted by Schutt
Also its quite common to devide the number by 10 and use 0 to 35, having 09 east and 27 west.
Ah, normally those headings are used for runways.

A little more trivia, you always fly "to" the runway heading and wind always comes "from" a certain direction.
For the game, you use the esc key to bring up the map. You will always be the little plane that is dead center on the map(clipboard). You can use the map to mark the cardinal points. North = the top of your screen. South = bottom of the screen. left = West, right = East. So if you pull up your map and your plane is pointed to the right on the map then you are currently flying East.
Another note. You can look at the map at the airfields and easily determine runway direction. For example, there are 3 different sized airfields in the game. The small field has one runway. It always runs North/South or Runways 36/18. Last bit of trivia, Two runways can share the same piece of concrete but are seperate. RWY36 is one runway with it's own set of approach equipment and RWY18 is also one runway with its own set of approach equipment.
Hope this helps.