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Full system showing Trainer and Instructors desk
The Trainer and Cockpit
The Link Flight Trainer was developed by Edwin Albert Link after getting his pilot’s license in 1927; his original Trainer was built in 1929 and was known as ‘The Pilot-Maker’. The Link family originally owned and ran a piano and organ factory hence the Pilot-Maker had many parts similar to those fitted in the organs of the time, such as valves and bellows.
The Pilot-Maker looked like a toy airplane from the outside with short wooden wings and fuselage mounted onto a universal joint. Organ bellows were driven by an electric air pump which made the Trainer pitch, roll and yaw as the pilot worked the controls; however, the Trainers air system works using a vacuum instead of positive air pressure.
The production version of the Pilot-Maker was renamed as the Link Trainer but wasn’t initially taken seriously by flight instructors or the military so was mainly purchased by amusement parks who used it as an attraction; Ed Link also used the Pilot-Maker in his own flying school.
In the early 1930’s, the US Army Air Corps was given the task of delivering airmail and taught their pilots to fly and navigate by having them watch the ground. Naturally, this was not very successful and the Air Corps lost twelve pilots over a 78-day period due to the pilots being unfamiliar with instrument flying conditions. The pilots had become disorientated while flying through clouds, fog or at night.
After this series of tragic losses, the Air Corps started looking into a variety of potential solutions, including the Link Trainer. In 1934, Ed was able to demonstrate the potential of his new trainer when he flew to a meeting with the Air Corps in fog conditions that the Air Corps’ evaluation team said was unflyable. The military subsequently ordered six Link Pilot Trainers, at a cost of $3,500 each.
Link Trainers built up to the early 1940’s had a bright blue fuselage and yellow wings and tail section. The wings & tail had control surfaces that actually moved in response to the pilots movement of the rudder pedals and joystick. However, many trainers built during the war years did not have these moving surfaces due to material shortages and critical manufacturing times.
The second and most prolific version of the Trainer was the AN-T-18 (Army Navy Trainer model 18). During the war years, the AN-T-18 Trainer became standard equipment at flight training schools in the US and other allied countries; the RAF version had a different cockpit layout representing RAF planes of that time. The trainer was known to many pilots as the ‘Blue Box’ due to it often being painted blue, and Ed produced over of 10,000 of these Blue Boxes during wartime, roughly one every 45 minutes.
195 Sqn’s Link Trainer is an AN-T-18 Variant D2 which was thought to have been built in 1943 by Link Manufacturing Co Ltd to train pilots in World War II on how to fly aircraft using flight instruments only. The Trainer was first installed at RAF Grimsby (Waltham) and was used for RAF pilot training; however, actual flying at RAF Grimsby ceased in 1945 as the concrete runways were in a very poor condition and were considered beyond economical repair at the time. 195 (Grimsby) Sqn ATC moved into RAF Grimsby at the end of the 1940’s but RAF Grimsby itself closed down in 1950, shortly after the Sqn arrived. It was at this point that the Sqn acquired the Link Trainer and has kept it running ever since then.
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