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High school dropout Ed Link invented a machine that revolutionized the way pilots are trained.

On December 30, 1941, Winston S. Churchill stood before the Canadian Parliament to offer Allied forces a rallying cry: “Another major contribution…to the Imperial war effort is the wonderful and gigantic Empire training scheme for pilots for the Royal and Imperial Air Forces. This has now been as you know well in full career for nearly two years in conditions free from all interference by the enemy. The daring youth of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, with many thousands from the homeland, are perfecting their training under the best conditions, and we are being assisted on a large scale by the United States, many of whose training facilities have been placed at our disposal. This scheme will provide us in 1942 and 1943 with the highest class of trained pilots, observers, and air gunners in the numbers necessary to man the enormous flow of aircraft which the factories of Britain, of the Empire and of the United States are and will be producing.”

The “scheme” lauded by Churchill relied upon the Link Trainer, the first successful pilot training simulator. Its origins can be traced to American visionary and self-taught inventor Edwin Albert Link, who dreamed up some very unconventional uses for pipe organ components from his father’s factory in New York State.

Link Trainers became the primary tool for ground training of pilots from the mid- 1930s to the early 1950s. Forerunners of today’s sophisticated aircraft, spacecraft and ground vehicle simulators, they made it possible for thousands of would-be pilots to learn the rudiments of flying without endangering themselves, instructors or airplanes.

 Ed Link was born in Huntington, Ind., in 1904, but mostly grew up in Binghamton, N.Y., where his father owned the Link Piano and Organ Company. During the silent-movie era, the firm made organs for theaters as well as coin-operated player pianos.

After his parents divorced in 1918, Link periodically lived with his mother, who had a propensity for moving from place to place. While they were living in Los Angeles in 1920, he took his first flying lesson. Sidney Chaplin, brother of silent-movie star Charlie Chaplin, was his instructor. As Link recounted in Lloyd Kelly’s book The Pilot Maker, after paying Chaplin $50 for a one-hour lesson: “I climbed up in the back seat of his Curtiss Oriole and belted myself in. For the better part of an hour we did loops and spins and buzzed everything in sight…but when we got down, I hadn’t touched the controls at all….I thought ‘that’s a hell of a way to teach someone to fly.’” Link reasoned there had to be a better and more economical way to safely instruct novices.

Ed’s formal education ended in 1922, when he dropped out during his junior year of high school. His older brother, George, had excelled in college, and their dad expected the same from him. But while Ed liked mechanics and science, academics didn’t interest him. “From an early age,” noted Susan Van Hoek in her biography From Sky to Sea, “young Ed was preoccupied with how mechanical things worked.”

His father, perhaps hoping to motivate his younger son to finish school, put him to work at the piano factory. Ed became an expert at assembling and tuning the company’s products, and then installing pipe organs in theaters. When he wasn’t on the job, he could usually be found at a nearby airport talking to pilots, tinkering with aircraft and running errands. Some fliers allowed him to taxi their planes, letting him get the feel of the controls. “Ed began to wonder… why he couldn’t build a device that would provide all movements and motions of…[an] aircraft and thus would allow preliminary flight instruction to be given on the ground,” wrote Kelly.

Working on nights and weekends, it took Link a year and a half to build his first trainer in the factory’s basement. He adapted valves, bellows and motors from pipe organs to create motion in his device. As later described in a Link company publication: “It was a stubby wooden fuselage with a cockpit, mounted on an organ bellows…operated by an electrically driven vacuum pump, which caused the fuselage to pitch and roll as the pilot ‘flew’ the trainer….” The simulator was equipped with instruments, rudder pedals and a control stick, all of which responded realistically enough to give a would-be pilot the sensation of flight.

Using Link’s training device, later equipped with a removable opaque canopy, pilots could safely learn how to fly “blind” on instruments. This would ultimately be one of the key factors in the trainer’s acceptance.

 In 1929 Link filed for a patent for his trainer, which he received in September 1931. He demonstrated it at numerous flight schools and even tried to display it at the 1931 National Aircraft Exhibit in St. Louis, but the exhibit’s organizers rejected it as a “gadget.” The trainer met with little acceptance—except as an amusement park ride. Thus the curious title/description for patent number 1,825,462: Combination Training Device for Student Aviators and Entertainment Apparatus.

As many inventors before and after him have learned, turning an idea into a product and then patenting it is often the easiest part of the process. Finding customers is the real challenge. Link would learn that persistence, luck and being in the right place at the right time, with the right equipment, were key ingredients to success.

In hopes of making some money and proving his trainer’s value, Ed started the Link Flying School with a bold promise: He would teach anyone to fly, guaranteed, for just $85. Naturally his school focused on ground training using his own device.

Ed proved the efficiency and effectiveness of his technique by teaching his brother George to fly. After six hours in the trainer, and less than an hour of actual in-flight instruction, George was flying an airplane. Ironically, even though he soloed a few hours later, George would never pilot a plane again. He had no real interest in flying, and had learned only to help out his brother.

The school did well at first, but as the Great Depression deepened, flying lessons became a luxury few could afford. Meanwhile, Link managed to sell a few dozen trainers to amusement parks and a handful of aviation-related companies. His hoped-for breakthrough, however, still eluded him.

In the early 1930s, Link literally dreamed up a way for businesses to advertise in the night sky. His wife, Marion, recalled that Ed awoke one morning and told her about his dream to use an airplane with a wooden frame under its wings fitted with dozens of light bulbs as a new advertising vehicle. As various bulbs turned on and off, they would spell out a company’s name or product, which could be seen from the ground. In actual use, a punched music roll and pneumatic system from a player piano controlled the sequencing of the lights. And to make sure people would rush outside to see his roving ads, Link sounded a siren as he flew over cities. He received a patent for his Illuminated Aerial Display in 1934.

Link gained several advertising accounts, and while the Illuminated Aerial Display wasn’t a gigantic moneymaker, it helped keep his company afloat in the Depression. Today’s blimps still use a system akin to Link’s for nighttime advertising, sans the siren.

In 1934 Link’s prospects started to look up as a result of some questionable political decisions and a remarkable flight by the inventor himself. The federal government had contracted with airlines to fly the U.S. Mail in the early 1930s. But on February 9, 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suspended all airmail contracts, effective February 19, because of alleged improprieties by airlines seeking to boost their revenues. FDR’s move was apparently supported by Secretary of War George H. Dern, who had earlier assured the president that the Army Air Corps could deliver the mail.

It was a disastrous decision. Within the first week, five Army airmen were killed. Airmail was typically flown at night and often in bad weather, and most of the Army pilots had received neither night-flying nor foul-weather training. During the 78-day fiasco of Army airmail delivery, there were 66 accidents and 12 crew deaths.

Just hours after FDR’s edict was made public, Link’s colleague Casey Jones, realizing the Army would need pilots who were trained for instrument flying, had arranged a meeting between the inventor and Army officials for the morning of February 11 at the Newark, N.J., airport. “The day dawned cold and foggy and thoroughly awful for flying,” Kelly wrote in The Pilot Maker. Army officials arrived shortly before the appointment time, studied the sky and, concluding Link couldn’t fly in that weather, decided to leave. Then the drone of an airplane’s engine was heard, and moments later Link descended from the murky overcast. “He had made it on instruments [more than 200 miles from western New York] and the Air Corps concluded that he must know plenty about instrument flying,” wrote Kelly. It was an undeniable demonstration that flying in foul weather or at night was not only possible but that Link was an expert on how to do it. The Army ordered six trainers at $3,500 each. According to Kelly, “When the Army took delivery of its first six trainers on June 23, 1934, simulators had made the grade and a new industry was born.”

 In 1935 Link Aviation Devices Inc. was founded. The Link Trainer was becoming standard equipment in military and civilian flight schools. With the buildup of personnel and equipment as the world hurtled toward war, the Link ANT-18 Basic Instrument Trainer, dubbed the “Blue Box” by fledgling pilots, quickly became essential to every flight training school in the U.S. and Allied nations. It would be the “make-or-break” machine for many would-be Army and Navy pilots, more than half a million of whom spent time in Link Trainers.

The Blue Box could rotate 180 degrees and tilt on two axes, giving students the sensation of flying a real airplane. Its covered cockpit enclosed students, forcing them to rely on instruments rather than visual cues. And if a pilot lost control or mishandled the unit, it could even “crash.”

Stationed at a control table next to the ANT-18, an instructor could simulate various flying conditions, transmit radio messages to the pilot and keep track of a student’s performance as he used instruments to “fly” the Link through various maneuvers. The course of each flight was traced on a map on the instructor’s desk.

There were obvious economic and safety advantages to using the Link Trainer to teach basic flight techniques and instrument flying. It conserved precious fuel and preserved aircraft, not to mention the lives of pilots and instructors. As one instructor said, “No cadet ever lost his life in a Link.”

In July 1934, with permission from the U.S. government, Link had sold a trainer to Okura & Company in Japan. Over the next year the Japanese military bought 10 more. The Japanese also invited Link and his wife to visit Japan so he could help them organize a training school for instrument instructors. The State Department encouraged him to go, undoubtedly hoping he would be able to gather some information on Japanese military strength and status.

Ed and Marion spent six weeks in Japan sightseeing and training Japanese instructors. “Ed’s first inspection trip of the training facility where the trainers were set up suggested a second reason for the trip,” Kelly wrote. “He was soon aware that one of the [trainers] had been completely disassembled and the mechanics were obviously having trouble putting it back together.” Link suspected it had been taken apart so Japanese engineers could copy each detail to make their own trainers. Asked to help reassemble the device, he declined, saying he would need special equipment to do so.

Link was constantly updating and patenting his trainers, adding improvements suggested by pilots. In the course of World War II, his company also started building trainers for specific aircraft. Link Aviation employed more than 1,500 people and produced in excess of 10,000 trainers during the conflict.

In 1939 Britain’s Royal Air Force ordered 250 trainers, and as the war went on, the UK would buy several thousand more. Link opened a plant in Canada to produce trainers there because his contract with the RAF required they must be built within the British Commonwealth.

Another device Link invented during the war years, the Celestial Navigation Trainer, was used to train bomber crews in night navigation. It enabled crewmen to practice using sextants to determine their aircraft position based on star locations from a projected display, which could be set up to replicate the night sky anywhere in the world. Housed in a 45-foot-tall silo-like structure, the trainer featured a fully outfitted cockpit and movable “terrain plates” that simulated the ground passing below.

In April 1946, Link patented the Star Globe. His patent application described it as “a classroom training aid for teaching the principles of elementary astronomy and celestial navigation…[and] to provide a means for making the study of astronomy and celestial navigation easier to be understood by the student.” The Star Globe was a transparent sphere accurately depicting the positions of stars and constellations. Inside, a small platform represented the viewer’s position relative to the night sky at any location.

After the war, Link Aviation evolved from making aircraft trainers to producing a variety of simulators for navigation, gunnery and numerous other training applications. In 1949 the company introduced the C-11 Simulator, the first for a jet fighter, the Lockheed F-80. Its interior was a duplicate of the actual aircraft, but the exterior looked more like a locomotive.

According to an article in the February 1950 Popular Science, the C-11 used 24 “electronic computers” to simulate aircraft status and flying conditions. Behind the enclosed cockpit the “check pilot” had a duplicate set of instruments and buttons and switches for “introducing a variety of operating troubles, ranging from fuel tank puncture or a fire to complete engine failure.” The C-11 was the first in a long line of electronically based Link simulators.

In 1954 Link Aviation merged with General Precision Corp. and Link became chairman of the board. He would retire from the aircraft simulator business in 1958 to start a new career in oceanic exploration, designing and developing diving systems and manned submersibles. Among his many ventures was the Submersible Decompression Chamber of 1960, which let divers return to their ship quickly from deep dives and decompress slowly on board rather than having to make a slow, and dangerous, return to the surface. In 1967 the mini-sub Deep Diver became the first submersible with a lockout system, whereby a diver could exit the craft to work on the ocean floor, then return to the sub to rest or go to the surface. Link also helped design the Cabled Observation and Rescue Device (CORD), one of the first successful remotely operated underwater reconnaissance vehicles.

Link never stopped inventing. He continued to design and improve small submersible vessels and other undersea equipment until his death in Binghamton on September 7, 1981. In all, he accumulated 27 patents, also earning many awards for his contributions to aviation and science. He received the Howard N. Potts Medal in 1945 for developing aviation training devices. In 1992 he was invested in the International Aerospace Hall of Fame, and he was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2003.

Although Link’s original goal in 1929 was relatively modest—to teach people to fly safely at a reasonable price—his trainer had launched a new industry and changed the way pilots are trained. In addition to the obvious improvements in training techniques, the results can arguably be measured in lives and resources saved.

Ed Link never finished high school, but he received a total of five honorary degrees, and he understood the value of education. Ed and Marion would donate millions of dollars for college scholarships in engineering and aviation via the Link Foundation. Biographer Van Hoek aptly summed up his remarkable career: “He came to realize his potential through imagination rather than academia…[and thereby] failed to learn his limitations.”

 

Richard Bauman’s articles have appeared in more than 400 different regional, national and international publications. Further reading: The Pilot Maker, by Lloyd L. Kelly, as told to Robert B. Parke; and From Sky to Sea, by Susan Van Hoek.

Originally published in the May 2014 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.