Flight Simulator

flight simulator, any electronic or mechanical system for training airplane and spacecraft pilots and crew members by simulating flight conditions. The purpose of simulation is not to completely substitute for actual flight training but to thoroughly familiarize students with the vehicle concerned before they undergo expensive and possibly dangerous actual flight training. Simulation also is useful for review and for familiarizing pilots with new modifications to existing craft.

Two early flight simulators appeared in England within a decade after the first flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright. They were designed to enable pilots to simulate simple aircraft maneuvers in three dimensions: nose up or down; left wing high and right low, or vice versa; and yawing to left or right. It took until 1929, however, for a truly effective simulator, the Link Trainer, to appear, devised by Edwin A. Link, a self-educated aviator and inventor from Binghamton, New York. By then, airplane instrumentation had been developed sufficiently to permit “blind” flying on instruments alone, but training pilots to do so involved considerable risk. Link built a model of an airplane cockpit equipped with instrument panel and controls that could realistically simulate all the movements of an airplane. Pilots could use the device for instrument training, manipulating the controls on the basis of instrument readings so as to maintain straight and level flight or controlled climb or descent with no visual reference to any horizon except for the artificial one on the instrument panel. The trainer was modified as aircraft technology advanced. Commercial airlines began to use the Link Trainer for pilot training, and the U.S. government began purchasing them in 1934, acquiring thousands more as World War II approached.

Technological advances during the war, particularly in electronics, helped to make the flight simulator increasingly realistic. The use of efficient analog computers in the early 1950s led to further improvements. Airplane cockpits, controls, and instrument displays had by then become so individualized that it was no longer feasible to use a generalized trainer to prepare pilots to fly anything but the simplest light planes. By the 1950s, the U.S. Air Force was using simulators that precisely replicated the cockpits of its planes. During the early 1960s electronic digital and hybrid computers were adopted, and their speed and flexibility revolutionized simulation systems. Further advances in computer and programming technology, notably the development of virtual-reality simulation, have made it possible to reproduce highly complex real-life conditions.