Link Flight Trainer is designated a historic mechanical engineering landmark

Henry Baumgartener
ASME NEWS

The Link Flight Trainer was formally designated a historic mechanical engineering landmark by ASME International at a ceremony held on June 10, at the Roberson Museum and Science Center in Binghamton, N.Y.

The flight trainer was developed in the late 1920s by Edwin A. Link. It was designed to teach basic flying techniques by providing aviators with a realistic replication of actual flying without jeopardizing the safety of either the pilot or machine.

Link applied for a patent on what he called his "pilot maker" on April 14, 1929, and Patent No. 1,825,462 was issued on Sept. 29, 1931. Around that time, he founded the Link Aeronautical Corp. to build the devices and the Link Flying School to train pilots.

The Link Flight Trainer has been named a historic mechanical engineering landmark. This is a model of the trainer from the 1940s.

Link was himself a licensed pilot who at the time was working in his father's organ building and repair business. Initially the trainer sat on a series of organ bellows that would inflate or deflate to various heights to make the trainer bank, climb and dive.

The Link Trainer offered the first virtual cockpit environment complete with a control column and control wheel, two-foot pedals, and various flight and navigation instruments.

The trainer sat on four pneumatic bellows that allowed air pressure to create simulated flight motion. Responding to commands from the control column, a series of linkages allowed an air admission port to adjust the pressure in the bellows to create the desired movement.

Later trainer models also emphasized flying by instruments rather than merely by visual observation.

During the 1940s, Link Trainers came into widespread use when more than 10,000 "Blue Box" trainers were used to improve safety and shorten training time for over 500,000 pilots. To this day, flight simulators continue to be used regularly by commercial, military and private pilots as an integral part of their preflight training.

Link simulators have been used to train Apollo astronauts for the moon landings and for the training of today's space shuttle pilots. As Neil Armstrong maneuvered the Apollo lander while landing on the moon, he reported, "Everything is A-OK. It throttles down better than the simulator."

At the ceremony in June, Nancy D. Fitzroy, a past president of ASME International, presented a bronze landmark plaque to the Roberson Museum and Science Center. Fitzroy paid tribute to the Link Flight Trainer as the first effective simulator to give pilots a "vision beyond sight."

"In fact," she said, "I 'flew' the shuttle simulator in Houston in the early '70s and that aircraft flies like a stone."

Also in attendance at the ceremony were Marilyn Link, a family member; David Burns, vice president, Binghamton Operations L-3 Communications, Link Simulation & Training Division; and David Gouldin, chairman of the Link Foundation.

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