Ed Link had an early fascination with flying, yet the expensive costs of plane rentals and fuel to practice his piloting skills were beyond his modest salary as a tuner of pianos and organs. So in 1928, using organ parts, bellows, and compressed air, he finished construction of a mechanical device he called the “pilot maker” (see http://www.link.com/history.html). It had short wooden wings with a fuselage mounted on a universal joint, capable of pitching and rolling while the fledgling pilot worked the controls. Further improvements to the device in the 1930s enabled pilots to train to fly in adverse weather guided by instruments, ushering in the era of modern day training simulators. During wrld wr II, tens of thousands of pilots were trained in Link simulators, and a …