TechStuff Tidbits: The First Flight Simulator

While modern flight simulators can be incredibly complicated and rely on powerful computer systems, the very first flight simulator didn't have any computers at all. Instead, it relied on stuff you'd normally find in a pipe organ. We learn about Edwin Link and his incredible flight simulator.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
are you. It's time for a tech Stuff tidbits episode.
Been a while since we've done one of those, and
this one's all about the first light simulator. And you know,

(00:28):
we use computers to do a lot of stuff, and
a lot of the stuff we do with computers is
super cool. Now a lot of it is super uncool too,
but we're gonna focus on the cool bits for this episode.
And while I can't point at any one use case
of computers as my favorite, like I can't say using

(00:50):
computers to do this is my absolute favorite use simulations
have to be way up there. So for a computer
to simulate anything, it has to take a lot of
factors into account. A really good simulation won't just figure
out how these factors will impact whatever it is you're simulating,
it'll also figure out how the factors influence each other.

(01:11):
So when you talk about stuff like weather simulations, computer
models that you know crunch tons of numbers to attempt
to predict future weather, it goes a little bit beyond Well,
historically when the weather was like this, then it rained
more often than it didn't. So there's a greater than
fifty percent chance of rain today. That's kind of where

(01:32):
we got started with weather predictions. But you using historical
data to predict future conditions. But now we've got much
more sophisticated models that run on supercomputers essentially in order
to project out what the weather is going to be. Anyway,
the world of simulations is enormous, right. It covers all
sorts of different things. It's got a very complicated history.

(01:53):
It's not like we can point to one thing and
say this was the first simulator. There are simulators that
are used for their tainment, you know, like maybe you
drive a virtual car around a racetrack, or maybe you
pit an army of computer controlled zombies against an army
of one a nearly invincible computer controlled john Wick. But today,

(02:15):
like I said, I really wanted to talk about the
origins of the flight simulator, which is interesting because no
computers are involved whatsoever. You see these days flight simulators
are incredibly sophisticated. There are some that require you to
get into a cockpit that has a virtual screen, it's
got a billion dials and indicators in it. It's got

(02:38):
complex controls that precisely mimic specific aircraft. It's mounted on
a platform that can be precisely controlled by various components
to manage the tilt and all of these factors. Right.
But then there are also some home PC flight simulators
that are really astounding, of the most famous being Microsoft

(03:01):
Flight Simulator. Modern flight simulators can create all sorts of
flight conditions. They can rely on hefty computing power to
get it all done in the process, but again, that's
not how they got started. It's very useful for violets
now to be able to step into a safe space
and practice flying in different conditions. But when it all

(03:23):
got started, it was taking a much less technically sophisticated approach. Now,
what most folks acknowledge as the first flight simulator had
no computer components at all. In fact, it didn't even
rely on electronics. It was a purely mechanical system that

(03:45):
used air and designed to teach pilots how to fly
by instruments alone. Now by that, I mean pilots would
learn how to read the various instruments in their cockpit.
You know, the various dials and things in order to
understand things like their altitude they're heading, the pitch, the yaw,

(04:06):
the speed at which they were traveling, both you know,
in a forward direction and vertically, and to use all
this information to pilot their aircraft, even if they are
otherwise in conditions that would prevent the pilot from seeing
their surroundings. In the earliest days of heavier than air flight,
pilots relied solely on their own sense of sight to

(04:28):
navigate and take off, and to land, they relied often
on their own body position to control the aircraft. The
Right Brothers built a plane with had some control surfaces,
and that allowed the pilot to have some ability to
control the aircraft in three dimensions, though in many cases

(04:49):
the pilot was also having to use their own body
to do that, not just like a control but to
physically shift in order to help move the aircraft where
they wanted it to go. But there were no real
dials or gauges or anything like that, so these first flights.
The Right brothers first flight was in nineteen oh three,

(05:11):
but over the next two and a half decades, early
aviators and engineers began to build more sophisticated aircraft that
had more control systems so that you could do finer
tuned maneuvers in the air. They also included instruments to
help pilots maintain proper control of their aircraft. Sometimes the

(05:32):
instruments would indicate something that might feel counterintuitive to a pilot,
and then the pilot has to make a choice, right
do they choose to control their aircraft in tune with
how they feel, or do they choose to do it
in tune with how the instruments are reading. And this

(05:53):
did not always turn out so well. When the pilots
chose to go with their gut feeling, that actually would
become an issue because would undergo certain stresses as a
pilot in an aircraft that would make you feel a
certain way that was convincing you that one thing was
happening when in fact that wasn't happening. But if you
act on that, then you could end up creating a

(06:16):
dangerous situation. The instruments were there to tell the pilot
what's really going on. You know, assuming the instruments are
in working order, which is why you have to go
through that long preflight checklist, then you need to trust
in that data and make your decisions based on that.
So in nineteen twenty nine, a pilot named Jimmy Doolittle

(06:40):
performed a pretty daring task. He flew in an aircraft
in which his view of the outside world was obstructed. Now,
some versions of the story say that he flew with
a safety pilot who presumably could see, but Doolittle was
in control for the whole flight and he could not see.
So he felt that pilots were relying too heavily on

(07:02):
their own senses, and as I said, those can be
fooled in the environment of a cockpit. Doolittle recognize that
pilots encounter situations that can trick them into thinking that
they're heading in a different direction, or that they were
suddenly climbing or diving, when perhaps they're not so. Doolittle
was a big believer in flight instruments and how reliable

(07:23):
they can be, and in nineteen twenty nine he proved it.
He flew by instruments alone, so he couldn't see anything.
He was just using the instruments to figure out when
he could take off, where he was going, how high
he was, how fast he was going. He flew a
course and then came back down and landed the plane
without ever being able to see the world around him.

(07:44):
It actually reminds me of how submarine operators work, right
Like submarines. You're big submarines, the ones that go deep.
They don't have windows. You can't see outside to the
world around you. You are basing everything on your instrumentation
and math. You're keeping track of how long you are

(08:04):
on a course and how quickly you're moving, and you're
using charts to understand what the sea around you, what
those conditions are like, and you make your decisions based
off that. Like it's you can't see anything, same sort
of thing, but in an aircraft, and his point, Doolittle's
point was a really important one. Aircraft travel in all

(08:26):
sorts of conditions. You know, you're not just flying in clear,
well lit conditions. You could be flying at night, or
maybe there's fog or other precipitation, maybe there's smoke. So
in those kinds of conditions, the instrument panel might be
all the information you can rely upon while you're trying

(08:46):
to operate the aircraft. So you have better darnwell know
how to fly by instruments. Now the problem is learning
to fly by instruments is challenging. Typically, you would need
to secure an aircraft right First, got to have an aircraft.
Then you need to have an instructor who can help
you as you are learning, and you have to spend

(09:07):
lots and lots of hours learning how to trust those
instruments and to make decisions based on their readings. Plus
you needed aircraft that actually had those instruments installed. This
was a non trivial challenge in the early days of aviation. Yes,
we had invented and engineered these instruments, things like altimeters
that would tell you how high you were. Now we

(09:29):
had these things, but a lot of aircraft just didn't
have them on there. Even the Army Air Corps had
instruments that were kind of sitting in storage waiting to
be installed an aircraft. But to do that you have
to make time to install it and test it and
make sure it works and all that kind of stuff.
And in the meanwhile, the aircraft you are upgrading isn't

(09:52):
in service, and often they were needed in service. So
there was a long stretch where a lot of the
aircraft that the Army Air Corps was using didn't have
these instruments at all. Okay, when we come back, we're
going to talk about the guy who came up with
a solution or a potential solution for the challenges you

(10:14):
face training pilots to fly by instruments alone. A guy
named Edwin Albert Link. We'll talk more about him when
we come back after this quick break. Okay, before the break, guy,

(10:35):
I was talking about Doolittle and how he was demonstrating
that a pilot could fly just using instruments without having
any view of the outside world at all. And then
I mentioned that there was this enterprising inventor who came
up with a device that would let prospective pilots train
without ever having to leave the ground. And again that
inventor was Edwin Albert Link. So Link was born just

(10:59):
one year to the right brothers took flight for the
first time. So by that, I mean he was born
in nineteen o four, Just in case you forgot that
I had mentioned the right brothers flew in nineteen o three.
He was born in Indiana, but when he was still
a young kid, his family moved to Binghampton, New York,
and his father was the owner of the Link Piano

(11:20):
and organ company. And yes, this does matter, So young
Eddie grew up around mechanical systems, and these were systems
that we're using pumped air to generate results. In the
case of oregans and pianos to generate musical notes. The
pianos that Link the Elder were making were automatic or
player pianos. Those use air power to work. I've done

(11:43):
episodes about how these player pianos work, so I'm not
going to go over it all again. But if you've
ever seen player piano roles, it's like this long roll
of paper that has holes punched into the paper in
different spots. Those holes are where air can pass through,
and it was the air that would power the mechanical
system within the piano to have keys pressed down and

(12:07):
produce a note. So the pianos and organs were using
bellows to pump air through systems to generate sound, and
that would end up being the basis for links invention
later on down the road. In fact, he was using
actual parts from his father's piano and Oregon company in

(12:28):
order to build this first simulator, so much so that
later on down the line there was a point where
the Oregon Company needed to salvage parts from a simulator
in order to repair an organ. So that's kind of
incredible anyway, link the younger Eddie baby, he was fascinated
by flying early in the nineteen twenties. He took some

(12:50):
flying lessons. You know, this is when at this point
he's still a teenager and even purchased Assessna in nineteen
twenty seven. But he also recognize the challenges I've already
mentioned about flying, particularly about how to learn to fly
by instruments. Like lessons, were also expensive, right, Not everybody
could afford to hire out an aircraft and an instructor

(13:14):
and take all that time to fly up in the
air and learn how to fly by instruments. He saw
that there was an opportunity here to create something that
would make the training process simpler, and he knew that
these skills were really important to be a dependable pilot,
to be able to be a really capable pilot, you
needed to learn how to fly by instruments. So he

(13:35):
came up with this crazy idea, and that was to
build a mechanical flight simulator. It consisted of a wooden
cockpit and it was just big enough really to hold
a person and then have the various instrumentation fed through
to the rest of the system. But yeah, it was

(13:55):
not huge. It was little wooden cockpit you'd climb in,
had a door that you could open and climb through,
and also had a hardtop cover that would completely enclose
the pilot inside, and there was no way to view
the outer world. You could just see the instrument panel.
That's it. But the instrument panel would provide all the
information needed to the pilot inside. The instrument panel actually worked,

(14:18):
it was connected to the rest of the system. The
whole cockpit was mounted onto a universal joint that could
tilt in various ways so that the simulator could simulate
changes in pitch. That's when the nose of the plane
is going up or going down, that's your pitch. And
also roll roll is the rolling to the left or

(14:38):
to the right. The actual base of the apparatus could rotate,
so that could simulate yaw yaws rotating right or left
as opposed to rolling right or left. Air pumps would
supply pressurized air to the bellows underneath the universal joint,
so by inflating or allowing to deflate bellows, you could

(15:00):
tilt the cockpit, so you know, you inflate the bellows.
More on one side, and they push up and tilt
the plane in the opposite direction, so the bellows on
the right no up, the plane ends up tilting to
the left, And this was actually controlled by the controllers
stick inside the simulator. As you moved the controllers stick,

(15:22):
it would allow valves to open and close, and so
the bellows would get more air or be allowed to
release air, and that would actually change the orientation of
the simulator itself. So the response wasn't immediate because this
is all air powered, but it would reflect whatever the
pilot was doing inside the cockpit, so it wouldn't be
quite the same sort of responsiveness you would experience with

(15:46):
an actual aircraft, but it did simulate it, just at
a slightly slower response time. Now, officially, the simulator would
become known as the link trainer, or at least the
whole line of these would be known as link trainer.
The more common name, especially in the military when they
would become popular a little bit later, was the blue box,

(16:08):
because the cockpit was essentially a box that you would
get client you would climb into and get shut up in,
and at least in the United States, they were frequently
painted blue. In other nations, they would be painted different colors.
Like I said, the instruments inside the cockpit actually would
give information to the pilot, while the Blue Box would
never actually get off the ground. It is firmly earthbound.

(16:31):
The altimeter inside the Blue Box couldn't inform the pilot
of how high they were going via the simulation, so
you could also get readouts for things like horizontal speed,
vertical speed you're heading, and all that kind of stuff. Now,
while the Blue Box couldn't crash, thus it was, you know,
safer than a real aircraft would be, so you could

(16:52):
put pilots through it without worrying about them encountering rough
air or bad weather and getting out of their depth
and tragedy following. The blue Box itself was not entirely safe.
One unfortunate feature of the Blue Box. It's hard to
say that over and over super fast anyway. One unfortunate
feature of it was that in order to be able

(17:14):
to see these instruments that are meant to be your
guide when you're flying, Eddie decided to have everything painted
with radium. So radium it's luminescent, it glows in the dark,
but it's also radioactive and being exposed to radium for
prolonged periods could lead to a higher risk of bad

(17:34):
health outcomes over time, So it is entirely possible that
early trainees encountered serious health issues later on in their
lives in part due to the training simulator. It gets
really tricky to draw firm consequences like you can typically
talk in terms of chance like probabilities, but it's very

(17:58):
difficult to say deffinitatively X number of people develop say cancer,
as a result of training in these simulators, but that
was a risk and we didn't know about it at
the time. The link trainer also had a station for
a human instructor, so they would not be in the simulator.
They would actually be sitting outside at a desk like

(18:20):
thing that would have a map, a radio so that
they could talk to the person who is inside the simulator,
and they would have their own set of instrument readouts
so they could actually see the same readouts that the
pilot would see, so the instructor could give instructions to
the pilot and then monitor the instruments to see if
the pilot was performing the maneuvers properly. In order to

(18:43):
fulfill the instructions, they were given. The pilot in turn
learned to fly by instruments alone while remaining safe on
the ground, so even if they did totally with it,
they would not come careening toward the ground and crash.
Link opened up a flying school and used a simulator,
which was called the Pilot Maker, to train students. But

(19:05):
the timing for this was more than a little bit
unfortunate because remember this was nineteen twenty nine when he
built the first prototype. Well, nineteen twenty nine also marked
the beginning of the Great Depression, an enormously damaging economic recession,
not even recession, I mean it was a depression. And
Link was able to produce some of his simulators for

(19:29):
amusement parks where they were used for entertainment purposes, but
it was hard to get students because a lot of
people just couldn't afford the classes. So things were looking
a little grim, but they would change due to a
scandal and a string of tragedies. I'll explain more when

(19:52):
we come back from this break. Before the break, I
mentioned that a scandal and some tragedies would end up
changing things for Edwin Link and bring his simulators into demand.

(20:16):
And the scandal was all about mail delivery in the
United States, as in sending mail or post if you
prefer letters, packages, that kind of stuff. Several companies that
would later become big commercial passenger airlines really got their
start by hauling mail between cities airmail right and this

(20:37):
was after the Post Office itself had operated its own
airmail service, a service that was plagued in the early
days by accidents that led to the tragic loss of life.
More than a dozen pilots in the early years died
as a result of crashes, and eventually the Post Office
was given permission, this would be in the nineteen twenties,

(20:58):
to contract with private airlines to carry US mail. It
got really complicated. It was a process that these private
companies would enter into. They would bid against each other.
So they're competing against each other for the right to
carry mail along certain routes because that was like a

(21:20):
guaranteed revenue source. They were also attempting to turn into
passenger airlines at the same time, and it was really complicated.
The US government had an interest in supporting this burgeoning institution,
this new type of industry, so there was this desire
to make certain that you know, the government wasn't going

(21:42):
to do something that was going to slow down the
adoption of flight, but the process was so closed off
and had some contradictions or at least perceived contradictions in it,
that a scandal developed, and it involved contract pricing, the
bidding situation, and it implied that the US government was

(22:06):
giving favorable treatment to some companies at the expense of others,
even in cases where one company would offer a more
competitive bid to carry the mail along a certain route,
but the route would instead be awarded to a totally
different company, meaning that the government was going to have
to pay more to this other company, and that money
is all taxpayer money. So that's why there was this

(22:29):
big scandal. The newspapers report, Hey, your taxes are going
to fund airmail, which is fine, except the government is
being wasteful because instead of awarding contracts to the most
competitive companies, they're going with these other ones, and it
looks really buddy buddy and corrupt. So this ultimately kind

(22:49):
of forced the government's hand, and in early nineteen thirty four,
the US would shift airmail duties from the private commercial
sector to the military. Specifically, the Army Air Corps would
take over air mail delivery in the United States. But
there was a huge problem. The Air Corps did not

(23:10):
have an excess of fully trained pilots with a lot
of flight experience. In fact, their most highly trained pilots
were busy training the next generation of pilots. They were
all tied up in pilot schools. More than half of
the pilots that were tapped for airmail service had less
than two years of flying experience to their names. Most

(23:32):
of them had never flown in bad weather, most of
them had never flown at night, and literally only a
couple of them had completed a significant time of flying
just by instruments. So you've got this job of delivering
a whole lot of mail, so the demand is there.
You're relying on inexperienced pilots, and primarily the Air Corps

(23:56):
was planning on doing night runs, so the mail was
going to be delivered at night. Again, most of the
pilots had never even flown at night. Now, as you
might imagine, this inevitably led to tragic consequences. There were
numerous crashes and fatalities. Unusually severe weather in the early
winter months of nineteen thirty four contributed to the problem significantly,

(24:20):
and you had around a dozen deaths in a couple
of months, and it was bad enough for the government
to quickly pass the Airmail Act of nineteen thirty four,
which would return airmail duties to the commercial industry, not
the military anymore. However, it also included more rules that
would allow for better transparency with regard to the bidding

(24:40):
process in order to avoid the appearance of favoritism. Meanwhile,
the Army Air Corps secured the purchase of half a
dozen link trainer simulators because they then recognized that they
were really putting pilots in danger. There were people who
were calling the approach the Air Corps was using a

(25:01):
death sentence for pilots. So this would allow pilots to
get more experience and familiarity with flying by instruments without
having to dedicate aircraft that could otherwise be put into
other service. So it saved the aircraft for official military use,

(25:22):
and it gave pilots more time to learn these systems
so that they could operate the aircraft more effectively and safely.
The value of the simulators was realized right away, and
Eddie would see his invention go into serious demand in
the following years because a little thing called World War
Two happened, and pretty much every nation in the Allied

(25:44):
Forces would end up purchasing simulators from Edwin Link in
order to train new pilots. He supposedly ended up making
ten thousand of these things throughout World War two, he
and his company, And it wasn't just him by himself,
that would have been insane, but yeah, his company produced
ten thousand simulators for Allied forces to train pilots throughout

(26:08):
World War Two. Now by this point Link had really
refined his invention. He introduced more instruments to provide students
the tools they needed to handle their aircraft more precisely.
It could even simulate a plane going into an engine stall,
because that was something that could happen. You have the
plane climb too high and the engine's not getting enough
air for internal combustion to continue. It stalls out and

(26:31):
it goes into a fall. It could even send the
simulator into a spin, which would give pilots a safe
space to learn how to handle these emergencies because they
could happen while you're operating these aircraft in a war theater.
So yeah, it was clearly a needed asset and giving

(26:55):
people the chance to learn these ways of how to
handle aircraft in extremestions without actually putting them in danger
meant that you were really improving their effectiveness once they
were out there actually serving. The most common version of
the simulator at this time was known as the Army
Navy Trainer Model eighteen aka the ANT eighteen for short.

(27:20):
There are actually a few of these old link trainers
that survived to this present day in various museums and stuff.
In fact, there are some that apparently at least let
people sit in the trainer and feel what it's like
to fly a simulation. I've seen YouTube videos of people
being able to do it. There was one museum where

(27:41):
they were talking about letting kids come in and experience
what it was. Although they frequently have limited control of
the simulator. They have restricted the full movement of the simulator,
so it can't do the full pitch and yaw and
roll it could have done in the old days, but

(28:02):
you get a little a little taste of what it's like. Oh. Also,
they've removed all the radium instruments, which is probably I
mean it is for the best. So you might find
one where all the instrument panels are made up of stickers,
which arguably are less less useful when you're learning how
to fly a plane. If the indicator never changes because

(28:23):
it's just a sticker on the dashboard, that's a problem.
But yeah, that was the first or what most people
acknowledge as the first flight simulator. Really incredible that it
could be done with air bellows and Pulley systems, you know,
just mechanical components to give this ability for pilots to

(28:45):
learn how to operate an aircraft under suboptimal conditions. It's
phenomenal to me that Edwin Link figured out a way
of doing that as early as nineteen twenty nine. Obviously,
in the years after World War Two we would get
much more sophisticated flight simulators, including computerized ones. They would

(29:10):
enter into both the military and the commercial sector, and
then as well to the consumer sector where we could
get a game that gamifies flight simulators to some degree,
some of which were obviously limited in their sophistication, where yes,
you could fly this flight simulator, but it wasn't maybe
the most realistic simulation all the way up to the

(29:33):
more recent ones, where from what I understand it is
almost precisely what you would encounter if you were going
to a commercial grade flight simulator. Obviously, with the exception
of most people don't have all the controls that are
modeled precisely after the ones that you would find an aircraft,

(29:55):
nor does the average person have a chair that will,
you know, pitch and roll the way the aircraft will go.
But still really cool and honestly, when I tell these stories,
when I look back at these sort of things and
I learn more about how this was achieved, it really
stresses to me how phenomenal human beings are, how inventive

(30:16):
and innovative they are, and how they can put problems
solving two tasks where perhaps a year earlier, you would
just think, well, that's just impossible. There's no way to
learn how to fly by instruments unless you go up
into the air yourself, and yet someone figures out a
way to do it. To me, that's just amazing. Maybe

(30:37):
it's because of my own limited imagination, creativity and invention
that I'm so flabbergasted by it, but it really, to
me is just inspiring to think, Wow, humans are really
creative people who come up with incredible solutions. They can
also come up with incredible pains in the butt. I mean,

(30:57):
I'm not gonna sugarcoat everything, but I do find it
inspiring that we're cabable of tackling a difficult challenge and
figuring out an interesting way to get past that challenge.
So I try and think about that whenever I'm feeling
a little overwhelmed. That No, sometimes it just takes a

(31:20):
little thinking outside of the blue box to get things going.
Hope you enjoyed this Tech Stuff Tidbits episode. I welcome
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(31:41):
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(32:01):
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