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The Antoinette Barrel Trainer is the fist known Flight simulator. Some would expect the plane invented by the Wright Brothers to have that distinction.
The difference is that the Wright Brothers' plane use levers to control the pitch and roll. While the Antoinette MoonPlane used wheels.
One wheel on each side of the pilot. There were problems in the use of the roll wheel. This was corrected with the invention of the joystick.
The Barrel Trainer was developed in 1909. Two flight simulators patented in 1917 were the Ruggles Orientator by W G Ruggles, and a moving cockpit trainer
by Lender and Heidelberg, although developed in 1915. These were used to train pilots during World War I. Amateur pilot, Edwin Link developed the
Link Trainer in New York. He began in 1927 but it wasn't until 1929 it was patented and for sale. His family business was manufacturing keyboard organs.
At first there was no interest in the Link Trainer. Until the Air Force was contracted to fly postal mail in 1934. Due to bad weather almost a dozen
Army pilots were killed in the early weeks. Edwin Link flew in for his meeting in bad weather at Newark Field in New Jersey. The Air Force bought four Link Trainers at $3,500 each
This was the start of the flight simulation industry. And so Link Aviation Devices Inc. was created. World wide sales began. One of the customers was the
Imperial Japanese Army. This led to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. 10,000 Link Trainers were manufactured for use in the US and Canada.
New flyers were trained in those countries before returning to their homelands for missions. In 1943 a trainer for the British Halifax bomber was produced at Silloth in the north of England.
The Celestial Navigation Trainer of 1941 was 45 ft high and capable of accommodating the team of a bomber crew.
In 1948, the first aircraft-specific cockpit trainer, owned by Pan American was made. It was developed by Curtiss-Wright for the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser transport aircraft.
This provided training to flight crews in drills and basic flight procedures. In the late 1960s visual systems or model boards were introduced. In 1964 it was found the 6 degrees of freedom
possible for a body to freely move could be achieved with the use of six jacks. These are: pitch, roll, yaw, up, down, sway, from side to side, and surge, fore and aft.
The 6-jack, or hexapod, platform was first used by Eric Gough in 1954. Since 1977 aircraft simulators for Commercial Air Transport (CAT) aircraft were designed with ancillaries
in mind. The Instructor Operating Station, or IOS, computers being an example.
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