Page 56 - John Francis Ryan

John would have been assessed on this type of D1 or D2 Link Trainer to access his abilities to fly
an aircraft by instruments. With the top cover closed the pilot was in a night time simulation relying
on his instruments only, as he would be doing on night operations with a Bomber Command
squadron.

The term Link Trainer, also known as the "Blue box" and "Pilot Trainer" is commonly used to refer
to a series of flight simulators produced between the early 1930s and early 1950s by the Link
Aviation Devices, Inc, founded and headed by Ed Link, based on technology he pioneered in 1929
at his family's business in Binghamton, New York. During World War II, they were used as a key
pilot training aid by almost every combatant nation.

The original Link Trainer was created in 1929 out of the need for a safe way to teach new pilots
how to fly by instruments. Ed Link used his knowledge of pumps, valves and bellows gained at his
father's Link Piano and Organ Company to create a flight simulator that responded to the pilot's
controls and gave an accurate reading on the included instruments. More than 500,000 US pilots
were trained on Link simulators, as were pilots of nations as diverse as Australia, Canada,
Germany, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Israel, Japan, Pakistan, and the USSR. Following
WWII, Air Marshall 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".