Are We Nearly There? How many times have we heard that from the back seat when on a long car journey with children? This personal review, after 50 years of experience in flight simulation, is a brief look at the journey towards the perfect flight simulator and how far we have travelled towards our destination. Let us take the starting point of our journey as Edwin A Link’s patent of 1930, forty years before the Flight Simulation Group’s first international conference. After an unpromising start, Link’s ‘Pilot Maker’ was adopted by the US Army. During the Second World War, over half a million allied airman were trained on Link’s 'Blue Box'. Since then we have travelled on several broad highways and explored some interesting side roads but have taken the occasional blind alley. During the past half century there have been some spectacular advances in the art and science of flight simulation. But is the pot of gold at the end of our rainbow as far away as ever? With so many disciplines harnessed in the development of ever more sophisticated training devices, it is only possible here to review briefly some of the more important ones.
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