Link Trainer

Following WWII, Air Marshal Robert Leckie (wartime RAF Chief of Staff) said "The Luftwaffe met its Waterloo on all the training fields of the free world where there was a battery of Link Trainers".

His first pilot trainer, which debuted in 1929, resembled an overgrown toy airplane from the outside, with short wooden wings and fuselage mounted on a universal joint.

The large scale loss of life prompted the Air Corps to look at a number of solutions, including Link's pilot trainer.

[8] Prior to World War II, Link trainers were also sold to the U.S. Navy, Civil Aeronautics Administration, Germany, Japan, England, Russia, France, and Canada.

[9] Link and his company had struggled through the Depression years, but after gaining Air Corps interest the business expanded rapidly and during World War II, the AN-T-18 Basic Instrument Trainer, known to tens of thousands of fledgling pilots as the "Blue Box" (although it was painted in different colors in other countries), was standard equipment at every air training school in the United States and Allied nations.

These trainers kept pace with the increased instrumentation and flight dynamics of aircraft of their period, but retained the electrical and pneumatic design fundamentals pioneered in the first Link.

Trainers built from 1934 up to the early 1940s had a color scheme that featured a bright blue fuselage and yellow wings and tail sections.

However, many trainers built during mid to late World War II did not have these wings and tail sections due to material shortages and critical manufacturing times.

The AN-T-18 featured rotation through all three axes, effectively simulated all flight instruments, and modeled common conditions such as pre-stall buffet, overspeed of the retractable undercarriage, and spinning.

The second major component is an external instructor's desk, which consists of a large map table; a duplicate display of the pilot's main flight instruments; and the Automatic Recorder, a motorized ink marker also known as "the crab".