Modern flight depends heavily upon the use of flight simulation. Flight simulators today reproduce the realm of flight and the characteristics of today's airplanes in a most realistic way. Simulators have advanced to the point where they helped make travel to the Moon, if not entirely uneventful, at least a pre-planned scenario.

Edwin Albert Link, born in Huntington, Indiana, a pilot from the mid-twenties was the son of a piano and organ manufacturing company owner near Binghamton, New York. Because flight training was so expensive, he wanted to devise a way to do as much training on the ground as possible. He also knew the airplane to be a terrible place to learn anything. It was noisy, bumpy at times, and very confining.

Because of his interest in saving time, and money, and wanting to better the French "Penguin System" of learning by airplane-operation-only-on-the-ground, in 1929, he invented what he called, "The Pilot Maker." The pilot maker was invented primarily due to Mr. Link's expertise in the use of piano and organ manufacturing. He utilized his skills, as well as many parts from such manufacturing work to develop his first useful model; the one eventually called by many, "The Blue Box."

The first "Blue Box" was, in the main, constructed of a series of bellows and motors and a universal joint beneath the box which caused it to react with the proper movements due to the operation of the control stick and rudder bar. A semblance of flight was the result.

During World War II, due to this extended use, the Link Trainer was used to train over half a million pilots.

Beginning with the model "A," and evolving slowly, by the time the Link incorporated the "Automatic Responding Crab Pen," such as the one displayed in the Aviation Museum of Kentucky, in Lexington, the trainer was dubbed the "E," special. The evolution in flight simulation has continued and the end is not in sight.