Hi Mal,
Yep, that ol' admiral has been annoying me for a while too!
This much I recall:
The CFS2 ship becomes an FS9 AI aircraft. It needs an airport to park at. Make such an airport with just a minimal runway and one start location. Give it an ID and name that will never show up on your Select Airport menu to confuse you. I use identifiers starting with ZZ, like ZZAA, ZZAB and so on, so they're at the very bottom of the drop-down menu. Then set up a flight plan that puts your carrier (posing as an AI plane) in the desired spot with one weekly flight, just a takeoff and landing back at that same airport, so that the flight takes place in the middle of the night on a weeknight. That way, the ship will always be where you expect it to be at any time you're likely to be awake and flying in FS.
Once the ship is parked in place, put in wake and stack smoke effects. I find it much easier to align the wake with the ship if the ship and the wake are on a heading of zero (or 360) degrees.
OK, there's your carrier. Next you have to give it a hard deck. You do that by creating another airport with a runway that matches the carrier's flight deck, a start location near the fantail (or on a catapult if it's a modern carrier) and a field elevation the same as the elevation of the ship's flight deck over the water. I give that airport an ID and name that I will be able to find on the Select Airport Menu. For example, for CV-4 USS Ranger off NAS Quonset Point I might use something like C4QP, Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic, USS Ranger, Off Quonset Point.
Because the ship is an AI aircraft, if you try to start your flyable aircraft in the same location, the AI plane won't show up. The hard deck will always be there, but you'll find your flyable plane sitting in the air over the water and the wake, with the stack smoke appearing from a point up in the air. Just go into Slew mode, slew the plane to one side and refresh the Time & Season, and slew back onto the ship, which has appeared like magic. (Once it's there it won't go away.)
Once I got the hang of it I found that I could set up a carrier in an hour or so.
Two caveats:
First, it's been well over a year since I set up a ship this way, and I well may have forgotten something. As I mentioned, I have lots of big plans for adding some straight deck carriers to my Classic Era sim, but I just can't get any hobby time these days, so I haven't re-studied the process and got it down pat again yet.
Second, not every CFS2 ship works in this scheme. Some will crash FS9, some will just not appear, and at least one ship I tried, a very nice WW2 American seaplane tender, shows up but becomes invisible when looked at from certain angles, so it kept popping in and out of existence as my eyepoint changed as I flew around.
Good luck!