Politics
An Early Flight Simulator Helped Pilots Learn the Ropes
In a new museum on Long Island, you can see a simulator that began as an amusement-park ride.
Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll get an early start on Veterans Day with a look at a new museum that is showcasing a very old flight simulator. We’ll also get a first look at a 74-foot-tall tree that is on its way to Rockefeller Center for the holidays.
“Before this,” Jeremiah Bosgang said, leading the way to a stubby-looking blue machine on a black pedestal, “the only way to learn to fly in adverse conditions was to fly in adverse conditions.”
That changed with devices like the blue machine, the centerpiece of a new museum on Long Island that Bosgang is overseeing.
The apparatus was an early flight simulator.
It was made of wood, like the aircraft it mimicked, and also cannibalized pipe-organ parts. In the cockpit were controls and gauges gave that a pilot-in-training the experience of flying without leaving the ground.
Bosgang said the lineage of flight simulators ran directly from that one to the $4.89 billion military simulator market, as well as to simulators used in everything from farming to medicine.
The new museum, the Sands Point Preserve Navy Simulation Museum, will open on Monday on the Sands Point Preserve, a onetime Navy research-and-development center where engineers worked on training devices from just after World War II until 1967.
