That needle on mine only reads the airport (runway) altitude. Once I take off, it drops to zero and doesn't move again until I land. So the way the needle works is as described in the manual.

@Lou. Kollsman? I never knew that. In the Flight Sim Design forums that I frequent, most (if not all) seem to believe it is spelt as Kohlsman. Well I'll be....

Mark

Mark, the CO1 in the book is NOT correct. The thin needle with the triangle shows tens of thousands NOT airport altitude.

From Kollsman page...
When set to the local barometric pressure in the Kollsman window, an aircraft pressure altimeter will register altitude above Mean Sea Level (MSL).  The long hand indicates hundreds of feet, the shorter, diamond-shaped hand indicates thousands, and the thinest hand (with the triangular tip) is tens of thousands.

http://www.kollsman.com

The reason as you state above, that the needle drops to zero and doesn't move again, is because something in the CS program is goofy and does not work as it should. Look again at the screen capture I posted above and see that both the Captain's altimeter and the CO1 in my plane are working as they should.

The 10,000 foot pointer will start to show movement as you climb. At 5,000 feet it will show between zero and one. At 8,000 feet it will show one mark short of the one. At 30,000 feet it will point to the 3.

If your having trouble reading this altimeter, it's no wonder! That is why they switched to the drum & pointer altimeter [Captain's] so as to avoid just this problem.

Lou