A working flight simulator, no computers necessary 

As a heads up, MOST's Link Trainer is usually only open to the public during special events! But it's a lovely museum, and I'm really thankful to all the team who helped put this video together.

The Link was made to teach pilots how to rely on instruments while flying instead of their own senses. With no visual reference, in a seat that moves and causes your sense of balance and direction to often be faulty, you are forced to look at the instrument panel and rely on what you see to fly properly. And, it worked.

I actually flew one of these. My brother-in-law was chief pilot for Southern Airways which used them. It had a "spider" connected to it. That was a small wheel with ink on it that ran across a map so they could see where you were traveling. Wind direction and speed were controllable. They put me in a hurricane. They said I ended up hundreds of miles off course and 60 feet under ground. 🙂

The best thing about this simulator for WW2 pilots was that it forced you to rely more on your instruments to travel than relying on sight, which can be rendered moot by nighttime or bad weather.

One overlooked benefit of the trainer was that those candidates who would not actually become good pilots could be more quickly and inexpensively be eliminated and reassigned to another unit.

Piece is a lot more complicated than it seems. It genuinely looks like a 25 cent storefront ride, but it has many more components that make up a plane.

There’s a story, and of course the accuracy is in question but it goes like this “One student got hopelessly lost, he was running out of fuel and told to follow his checklist, the final step of which was to bail out of the aircraft. He promptly opened the canopy and leap out, attempting to clear the propwash so he wouldn’t be bounced against the fuselage. Instead of parachuting to safety he broke an ankle, consequences of immersive flight simulation”

I love the fact that Tom has *actually* flown blind, before getting in the Link Trainer

"I'm gonna look back on the footage for this and realize, that I've just been spinning all this time." - Someone who was, in fact, spinning, the whole time.

I saw one of these at the De Havilland Aircraft Museum, such a neat piece of kit. Their one is in working order too :D

Now that Tom's flown a plane blind, he takes on the ultimate challenge: Flying a not-plane blind

As basic as everything else seems, that yaw system with bellows driving cranks seems way more sophisticated - you'd think electric motor control at the time would have been good enough to provide a simpler yaw drive (keeping the bellows for the pitch/roll). But it's really cool to watch, has a very steampunk look to it.

I trained on one of these at an Air Show back in high school. Hey brought it out to the airpark and let us all have a go. it really got me into flying. 17 years later, I am working on my private pilot's certificate and fly regularly in MSFS20 through VATSIM. Such a cool experience.

In the 1980s, I considered becoming a Canadian military pilot and their selection process involved having to spend time in a trainer very much like this one. There was a diorama on a curved wall with an horizon and other features.

I flew one as a Cub Scout in the ‘60s. My Den Mother’s family had one in her house! One of the greatest thrills of my childhood.

I initially thought this’d be about something like the space shuttle simulator, where they had electronics but no realistic computer graphics so they put an analogue video camera on a robot arm above a miniature scale model of the terrain around KSC and piped the feed to the screens in the simulator so that when the astronauts moved the controls the image they’d see would be accurate.

My mind immediately jumps to think of the RAF Langham "Langham Dome" - which was WWII virtual reality trainer for antiaircraft gunners. Something quite remarkable and sophisticated for its time.

That thing deserves to be refitted with working instruments, perhaps replicas of the original ones - using safer paints of course.

Mechanical tech is so cool, I know computers can do all of this and more in a smaller package but these things are still marvelous

These were designed in Binghamton, NY ( hour south of where this vid was filmed) and possibly manufactured there as well. Years back I was volunteering a museum collection called tech works which has several trainers from different eras as well as a good portion of the engineering documentation on them. I think a good portion is on their web site if your interested. Also Tom, I’m impressed you did as well as you with out instruments.

We had a Link trainer at my old ATC squadron and was taught to fly by instruments on it. It was always fun to see how the course drawn by the plotter compared to what you were trying to fly, especially in “bad weather”.

They have one of these in Duxford too. It always amuses me to see them, stepping out of a multi-million pound full motion sim at work seeing where flight training has come from

There's a guy restoring a link trainer in Urbana, Ohio at the Champaign Aviation Museum. I got to test it out a few weeks ago. I was impressed by how smooth it was, it really did feel disorienting in the same way flying on instruments in the clouds is.

Way back in the 70’s I was it the cadets Air Training Corp (Thetford 1109 Sqd) in the UK and we had a Link Trainer. Spent some crazy and enjoyable times in it understanding the principles of instrument flying. Fast forward to the present, I’m now a Captain working for a commercial airline. The link trainer got me hooked with flying.

Should go north to Camden NY. They have a 'wooden boat museum' there. At one time they had a wooden flight trainer that was essentially a one-legged hydrofoil that was towed behind a speedboat. The student pilot would sit in the top of it and control the underwater surfaces with a 'stick'. They could learn the basics of maintaining level 'flying' above the surface of the water and banking left and right to turn. Bit of a precursor to this flight trainer. I believe it was also a 'Link' trainer.

My grandfather taught people how to instrument fly on one of these Link Trainers during WWII. He still had his "flight book" from back in the day, where he had logged over 1,000 flight hours in one! He was quite proud of it & used to talk about it often. (I wish he was still with us so I could send him this video.)

Link Aviation lives on to this day, as part of CAE USA. Still working on modeling and simulation systems for the military!

Ha, I could hear the sound from the ball machine in the background and knew where you were immediately. We have a family membership and bring our kiddo there a lot in the winter. I have never actually seen the trainer in action. Thanks for the awesome video!

Tom's prescience shows its one truly limiting quirk: he only knows what will happen when it comes to looking silly on camera. Seriously though, awesome video and well done!

Wonder how many lives this saved, training for night flying is extremely dangerous in any era but during WW2 I can't even imagine! The Battle of Britain museum has a Spitfire trainer but it's just a static device to allow pilots to become familiar with the controls.

*in the middle of a graveyard spiral* Tom: "i feel like i'm quite level!"

My grandfather, a radar operator in Scotland during WWII, remembers the flight line personnel getting so annoyed at his criticisms of poor landings that they dared him to try and land a plane in one of these things. The air-side crew were shocked at how beautifully he managed to "land"... with the minor exception of grandpa having "landed" at 100ft below ground level! He says he mostly shut up about bad landings after that :-).

One of the most brilliant things about it is that the sound of the motors and compressors running would very closely mimic the sound of a plane engine as heard from within the cockpit, making the experience that much more realistic. IMHO, actually _feeling_ like you were in a plane would make the transition from simulator to actual aircraft considerably more seamless in terms of being able to adapt.

I now work at CAE-Link. We have one of these just down the hall from my desk, just past the VR Lab as a matter of fact.

*If this was in an amusement park the tickets would surely be sold out! What an incredible piece of engineering considering the timeframe...*

I was extremely fortunate to have been able to have a "flight" in one of these recently. The volunteers at the Nhill Aviation Heritage Centre in Victoria, Australia have a working Link trainer that they have restored, including replacing all the instruments with working ones. They even had the map table which had a robotic shuttle of sorts that when working (this part had yet to be restored to a working state) would track with the pilot's movements over a map, drawing the course taken on the map with a wax pencil. Absolutely remarkable for a completely analogue system!

i saw one of these in a ww2 training film i was watching a few months ago and immediately thought "that's a brilliant idea" with just the simple calculations for each gage you have everything you need to train not only on bad weather or night time flying, but it was a US navy film so even just regular navigation at sea when your only landmark is water.

Can we just take a moment to admire the fact that in the opening clip, that's MSFS, a personal use, non commercial flight sim, in the background with unofficial helicopters running. ;)

I actually got a chance to "fly" one of those when I was young. My father was in the USAF and we got a day at a pilot training facility. Had a great time.

Surely someone could get them a new set of working instruments! Doesn't have to be 1930s vintage. Modern instruments have barely changed.

1:56 "And so it's actually physically going *PTHHHHHH* "

Gotta love that even though it was made during wartime they still took the time to paint it like the real American trainer aircraft

Good to see Binghamton being represented. This area has a rich history for industry, like Endicott-Johnson and where IBM was founded.

We had one of these at school (80's) albeit broken. I managed to get it working. It was linked to a map plotter that was a separate unit that moved over a fixed map.

The somatogravic illusion is s utterly convincing, it is the reason we even have IFR and VFR (I for Instrument, V for visual flight rules). Any dummy can watch the instruments, instrument rating means you are convinced that the instruments are correct, and that your vestibular system (sense of balance) is incorrect. Human orientation senses are very ambiguous, it needs input from other sources to disambiguate it. A subtle cue can be all you need to reinterpret your senses to tell you that your orientation is changing badly.

old analog devices like this always astonish me! not only are the designs super complex, but the manufacturing usually is too. I'm just glad that I live in an era of computers where this stuff is much more simple.

Seems like they could use a glow-in-the-dark paint to simulate the radium that had to be removed. Flying with zero visibility and no instruments, people will naturally enter a turn, thinking they are going straight.

During part of World War 2, my father used to service these things at No 7 Service Flying Training School at RAF Collins Bay (now Norman Rogers Airport) in Kingston, Ontario. It was part of the BCATP (British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in which trainee pilots were sent away from the war zone to Canada and Australia to learn to fly ). Many years later in the 1980's , I ended up repairing and servicing a Link trainer that had belonged to the NZCAA and that had been given to the RNZAF Museum. Between just two of us, we learned how it worked and got it fully operational, along with all the original instruments, the plotting table, and the _"remote instrument box"_ and the _"crab"_ (both of which you can see at 4:05). The crab was an interesting thing, a triangular box with rounded corners that had three wheels on the bottom all of which (driven by servos and electric motors) steered the crab around the plotting table. The front wheel had a rubber tyre that brushed against an ink pad so that it drew the student's flight path on a map on the plotting table. The Link trainer was a truly awesome thing to work on - electro-pneumatic and electro-mechanical technology from a bygone age, and something I will never forget.

Used to have one that fully worked at my old RAF Air Cadet unit in the 80’s. It was an amazing piece of equipment. Fantastic memories 😊😊

My airport had one of these 60+ years ago, still operational. I got to sit in it as a child, don't remember anything! But it's similar to the FAA's disorientation apparatus, which I did have a chance to sample (and kept my lunch inside, thank you!)

If Tom's in the states i wonder if he could get on one of Iowa class battleships to look at one of the Mark 1 fire control computers.

I wasn't expecting that to be so immersive. Guess that's what made it effective.

Petition to cast Tom Scott as the Doctor. He's already got his flying blue box 🤣

On the topic of simulators without computer - the Apollo program had an even more incredible solution to this problem. The LEM simulator used a small-scale model of the lunar surface with cameras mounted on gantries to generate the in-cockpit views, as opposed to the computer renders of today. I believe this was also used for a number of other simulators.

As an Air Training Corps cadet (UK) in the late 50s we used Link Trainers in our regular midweek evening meetings. Ours was more RAF grey-blue than blue and we had linked maps.

I once flew in a Link trainer about 30 years ago. It really stepped up my enthousiasm for aviation

I like how it's dark inside I guess because they couldn't display anything like where they'd be flying

As a double Ace Airscout, and advancced high school student, 1947, I was one of the instructors for dozens of pilots who trained on our Link Trainer. I vividly remember using the tracker and having pilots fly paterns, from takeoff to landing. Yes, our High School was unusual, the principal an enthusaistic pilot and got the school board to have the Link Trainer installed. Sad the instruments do not work, students lived by the aritificial horizon and altimiter.

My school still had a working one of these in the mid-90s! The air cadets would use it alongside doing air experience flights at Manston. On the desk next to it was a glass sheet over a map where an ink plotter would move along on your imagined course, so you could see how well you’d navigated at the end.

Saw one of these at the museum of flight just yesterday!

The radium on the dials is harmless - unless you ingest it.

Yes, been wanting a new video on this splendid device. I remember going down the trainer rabbit hole for airplanes and looking for the most retro "simulation system". Then I come across this and how widespread and important it quickly became.

I like the little touch that it's even an era appropriate color! Every bit of realism helps!

I'm a Retired Argentinean Navy Pilot, and I have trained in one of these. Also, when I was stationed in a helicopter squadron I hads access to a biographic book called "The Pilot Maker" that tells Edwin Link's story, a really interesting one.

This is so cool! Had no idea this existed, and it turns out the one you used in this video is very close to where I live!

The pipe organ link is amazing to me - I remember reading somewhere (fact-checkers, knock yourselves out) that until the invention of the telephone exchange, the largest pipe organ would have been the largest mechanical system ever invented...

I actually had a contract software engineer job for Link Systems a few years ago. They had one of these Blue Boxes in their lobby. Found out something else as well while working there. During the war, there was some money issues with the company, and they were barely able to keep afloat. After the war, they were able to get back on their feet. The owner of the company, when he eventually went to sell it, included an unusually provision in the contract. It listed the people that stayed with the company through the war and its troubles, and included a provision that none of those people could be fired without due cause, and that any subsequent sale of the company needed to retain that clause until all those people had voluntarily retired or passed away. THAT is an example of a CEO looking out for his people.

For anyone in the UK who doesn't fancy a trip to New York to see it, my late grandfather bought one as a box of bits and rebuilt it, it can be found at Rougham airfield near Bury st Edmunds in Suffolk, clocks and all! Please visit it if you can, all the chaps down there will be happy to see you!

When I saw the thumbnail, I thought it looked familiar, then he said it was at the MOST and I couldn't believe he was at the museum from my childhood! Shoutout to Syracuse, hope you got try some of the great food there

It's amazing how time distorts facts. There is one, and ONLY one, purpose of the Link Trainer -- to teach pilots INSTRUMENT flying (AKA "Flying Blind".) THAT is why the hood makes it so they can't see the outside, just as if they were in instrument conditions. By the time students pilots got to this trainer, they were already flying real planes.

I am 84 years old. We had one in our high school's electric shop. Left over from WWII. We got it working and had a great time with it. Had to do a lot of patching of the bellows, though.

"Flew" a Link trainer back in the 50's when I was about 11 years old. My dad worked in TCA's simulator department on the then new Viscount simulator. They still had some Links for instrument competency. The Viscount Simulator was the latest thing but it was fully analog with lots of mechanical parts in a large cabinet making up the "computer". Later I got to fly that simulator too.

We had those for instrument ground school in college in the 80’s. Shortly after I started, we got Frasca simulators and the Link simulators went to museums. It’s possible this was one of them.

flying without vision and without instruments explains why you were having so many issues with going in circles. the inner ear doesn't register constant rotation at the same speed and you have no other reference

Living in Syracuse and having watched you for years, I NEVER expected you to visit something here, but the MOST would definitely be the place to visit.

At this point I'm not even surprised but just amazed!

1:07 i love how much this looks like one of those kiddie rides outside grocery stores and the like xD

Radium instrument dials are NOT "Highly Radioactive", they are mildly radioactive at best, and sealed in an instrument they are completely harmless behind glass.

That is ridiculously cool! Really nice to see a working example and in such good condition too!

When i was in the air cadets for teenagers, we had a canvas version of this. We greatly appreciated it and knew the history of it. But we never got to see it operate as it was such an antique that looks very fragile in person. To see this operational is an absoloute sight to behold. Many thanks for this video !!

Breznett aviation museum (England) has a Link trainer that is/was recently working. There is one at Robertsbridge Aviation Museum (England) but there was a health and safety issue regarding radiation from the Luminous paint so people couldn't sit in it. There is another Link trainer at the De Havilland Museum.

This, the simulation of Chamberlain declaring war, and Operation Mincemeat, have thoroughly convinced me that any slight altercation to what the Allies did would have made us badly lose the war

This is very cool. If you want to know what it was like to be a pilot in WWII, I'd recommend reading Road Dahl's autobiography "Going Solo". Even though pilots were getting training, it still wasn't easy and many died.

I knew of these but it is good, Tom, that you have had this experience and shared it with the world.

Tom, please visit the simulator in the UK (if you haven't already) that uses a miniature scale landscape, onto which a video camera "flies" above it all, the signal of which is enlarged onto TV monitors (CRT not flat-screen!) in the mock cockpit. They were the next generation simulators after the blue box, I imagine, and it fooled the senses brilliantly. I crave to see it again, the lone still-working room-sized miniature landscape and accompanying 60s era video lens.

This is particularly designed to train pilots how to fly on their flight instruments only, without being able to see outside (like flying through clouds)

As a binghamton resident who vaguely knew that these existed, it’s so cool to see one in working order.

As a boy, somewhere in the 60's I visited an air show in The Netherlands and they showed a Linktrainer. Boy's could line up to sit in the trainer and try a few minutes. And off course I did! It was exactly as you see in this clip. It also had the plot table to track your course. Great to see this!

The crudity of the control responses, the rumbling and jerky movements, the hissing of air leaks, were normal for a/c in the mid 20-th century. The instruments worked in the same ways. The design is clever not crude. We often used LINKs in the 70's English Air Cadets.

As a person that lives within 30 minutes of Syracuse, NY. I have to thank you Tom for covering the MOST museum, it’s one of our hidden treasures.

I was very fortunate as a child to have gotten the chance to use one of these in the Kilpatrick Air and Space Museum in Oklahoma City. It was great fun. Thanks for the video @Tom Scott, it brought back fond memories.

As someone who is endlessly fascinated by analog pneumatic technology this video really tickled my fancy. Incredible what you can do with mechanics and air pressure.

"When you said wooden blue box, I thought you’d mean an extraterrestrial space ship time machine flown by a 2000 year old alien, not some carnival ride!" ~ Some kid, probably

3:56 *roller coaster flashbacks intensify*

My grandfather was a flight trainer in WW2, incredible to see a Tom Scott video about what he did! Thank you so much

I'd love to build one of these with a few modern touches: maybe a VR headset or some kind of system that tells you where you are so you can do day flying.

Tom is an experienced pilot by now

I realise I'm kind of old, but I used that device in the USAF in the 1980's in pilot school. Thanks Tom. Dave J

Yesterday I had the privilege of meeting this legend he came in to get some ice cream on what I assumed to be a vacation (as I live in the us) his manners were amazing and I hope he enjoyed his huckleberry ice cream thanks for making these amazing videos for us to learn from I love them!!

the MAPS museum in Akron Ohio has a working one of these on display as well with the map plotter you briefly mentioned