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Flying the Virtual Skies: A Brief History and 1632 Perspective on Flight Simulation

Written by Sean Massey

For almost as long as there has been flight, there have been simulators to assist in training would-be pilots in the art of flying. They have evolved from primitive mechanical trainers to electronic cockpits.

With Grantville leading the creation of an air force in the 1632 universe, there will be a demand for flight simulators. The need won't be immediate, as there are few planes in service with the United States of Europe, but as more are built, and more combat losses occur, simulators will take an important role in training new pilots.

The standard method of pilot training is placing students in the cockpit with an instructor and teaching them to fly "hands on." In 1633, this method was used to train Hans Richter and the first batch of Air Force pilots. But with few flight instructors, fewer aircraft, and many potential pilots, simulators are sure to become one aspect of the Air Force's training program.

Pilot Training Before Simulators

The first attempts at training pilots occurred in aircraft, usually gliders, on the ground. Would-be pilots would be placed in the aircraft, exposed to a headwind, and be given the chance to get the feel of the controls.

In the early 1900s, there were many attempts at building artificial simulators. The first artificial trainer was developed in 1910 and consisted of little more than two sections of half-barrels. These were moved manually to simulate the motion of an aircraft.

Another notable attempt was the Saunders Teacher. The Teacher was an aircraft mounted to a joint. Like the glider training methods, it was faced into the wind, and the Teacher's controls responded to the aerodynamic forces. The Teacher and similar devices never caught on due to the unreliable nature of the wind.

World War I, the 1930's, and World War II

The outbreak of war in 1914 created a great demand for pilots in the growing air corps of Europe, and along with it, a greater demand for better training methods. Aptitude assessments of potential airmen were instituted, and novel methods of training, such as short-winged aircraft that weren't capable of flight and mounting an aircraft to an overhead gantry or railway cars were tried without success. A few electro-mechanical devices were tried, and the most successful of these was the pneumatically-powered Link Trainer in 1929.

In the late 1920's, instrument flight training became a higher priority, and trainers were developed or modified to accommodate this. The first instrument trainers required an instructor to manually control the simulation, but later simulators had instruments that were operated by mechanical or pneumatic methods.

To assist with instrument flight training, a course plotter was developed in the 1930s. This device traced the flight path of the trainer on a chart and allowed instructors to manually control signals from navigation aides.

The Link Trainer, combined with the course plotter, was the star of the era. In the late 1930s, it had received sales from Great Britain, the Empire of Japan, and American Airlines. By the eve of World War II, it had become the instrument trainer of several major air forces.

When World War II began advances in aircraft technology increased the need for cockpit training. Trainers were equipped with mock-ups of aircraft instrument panels and fuselages. Later in the war, radar trainers were added to the simulators to create Aircraft Interception Trainers. Other features were added for gunnery instruction and torpedo attack training.

The Link ANT-18, known to many pilots as the Blue Box, became the most popular flight simulator of its era. Over 10,000 were built, and they were used in every flight school in the United States and Allied nations.

One new simulator developed during the war was the Celestial Navigation Trainer. This trainer, which began development in 1939, was designed to train bomber crews on celestial navigation and improve nighttime bombing accuracy. The trainer had room for the pilot, navigator, and bomber. Navigation training was accomplished by a combination of radio aids and the use of a constellation of stars that moved based on the aircraft's supposed location. In addition to this, a series of photographic plates were suspended below the simulator for bomber training.

The Electronic Era

The shift away from mechanical simulators began around the same time as the Link Trainer was developed. The first mention of electronic flight simulators was in 1929, but practical developments didn't begin until ten years later with the development of an electronic analogue computer at MIT.

The first electronic flight simulators were put into service in 1941 in Great Britain. They were primarily used for Aircraft Interception Radar trainers.

Following World War II, simulators moved away from motion systems to fixed-base systems. It was argued that the pneumatic motion systems could not simulate the forces a pilot experienced in flight correctly, and while the Link company disagreed, they eventually produced fixed-base trainers.

Commercial airlines adopted electronic simulators about the same time that the military did. Curtis-Wright delivered the first Boeing 377 Stratocruiser simulator to Pan-Am Airlines in 1948. This became the first full simulator owned by any commercial airline. This simulator lacked visual and motion features which gave it a feeling of being unreal, but it was used to train flight crews for emergency situations.

The electronic simulators of the 1940s and 1950s used analogue computers. Analogue computers are a form of computers that use either electrical or mechanical methods to model a problem that needs to be solved. The reliability of analogue computers was limited, and the operations of simulators were consequently limited to twelve hours. Another problem with analogue computers was inflexibility; they couldn't run several different programs as can a digital computer. Unfortunately, digital computers of the time didn't have the processing ability to handle real-time simulation.

By the 1970s, the digital computer, now fast enough for simulation support, had replaced analogue computers in simulators for airlines and the military.

When Link sold the electronic simulator to the United States Air Force in 1949, it didn't include a system for simulating motion. At the time, Link had argued that it was necessary for pilot training, but his customers disagreed. This trend would continue through the mid-1950s.

Redifon, a British simulator manufacturer, was asked to build a simulator for the Comet IV that included a system for simulating pitch motion. This led to the development of more advanced systems that eventually simulated all six degrees of freedom.

Modern simulators come in many varieties. Simulators for commercial airliners and larger military aircraft tend to be large, cab-like structures that are equipped with full-motion systems and full cockpits while simulators for smaller aircraft such as fighters and helicopters tend to be fixed-base simulators without motion.

Simulators and the Home Computer

When many people think of consumer flight simulator software, the program that first springs to mind is Microsoft Flight Simulator. It is the most visible of the flight simulators available today, but it's not the only one. There is a large market that has everything from virtual airlines to programs that allow budding pilots to fly the latest fighter aircraft. One simulator even allows users to fly over the surface of Mars or in outer space.

The first consumer flight simulator, Flight Simulator 1.0, was released in January of 1980 for the Apple II and Radio Shack TRS-80. It was developed by Bruce Artwick, and the program would later ...