CORPORATIONS: The Busiest Link

The man who has taught more pilots to fly than anybody else in history is Edwin Albert Link. Since 1929, Link has made and sold 4,500 trainers (i.e., simulators for flying, bombing, navigation) on which more than 2,000,000 pilots and other airmen have learned the feel of flying while still on the ground. Last week, at United Air Lines’ Denver flight school, Link put into service his latest and most costly commercial trainer, a $1 million electronic marvel that includes a full cockpit with all the controls and dials of a Douglas DC-8 jet airliner. On it. United will train its crews for the jet age, giving them a taste of almost every conceivable problem they will encounter in the air.

By feeding coded instructions into computers, a flight instructor can suddenly and without warning create emergency conditions, such as brake or control-surface locking, icing, failures of power. To lend realism, a TV picture of a huge scale model of an airfield shows the pilot how the appearance of the ground changes as he takes off and lands. In addition to United, eleven other lines will school their pilots for the jet age on Link trainers, both for the DC-8 and Boeing 707. The trainers will save the lines huge sums, since it costs only $36 an hour to learn in a trainer, compared to upwards of $1,000 in a plane.

Hobby Into Career. The prospect of such spectacular savings in flight training was what spurred Ed Link to invent his first trainer more than 30 years ago while working in his father’s piano-and-organ factory in Binghamton, N.Y. Link, whose hobby was flying, saw the need for a training device that would prepare flyers for flying before they had to take a real plane into the air. He and his brother George put together a plane-like gadget, offered to train all comers to fly at $85 a head (v. $25 to $50 per hour for in-the-air flight instruction). But no one paid much attention to the trainer until 1934, when the Army Air Corps was suddenly called on to carry air mail. It found its pilots, trained to fly by watching the ground, not up to the job. After close to a dozen were killed within the first week, the Air Corps hastily began to buy Link trainers to simulate instrument-flying conditions.

The company expanded rapidly and during World War II the AN-T-18 Basic Instrument Trainer, known to tens of thousands of fledgling pilots as the Blue Box, was standard equipment at every air-training school in the U.S. and Allied countries. Every advance in planes and missiles brought new Link trainers—for jet fighters and bombers, transpolar celestial navigation, and for the Matador, Sparrow and other missiles. Link trainers are now being used to go through dry runs on test firings of space shots. Says Link: “Some of our missile failures were traced to human errors. In the boredom of a countdown, somebody forgot to push a button.”

In 1954, to get more laboratory space and capital, Link Aviation, Inc. joined up with General Precision Equipment Corp., a big grab-bag holding and management company that includes 16 other subsidiaries making everything from theater equipment and industrial controls to missile components. Link later became president of the parent company as well as retaining the chairmanship of the Link subsidiary. From an office in Manhattan, he keeps projects popping in G.P.E. plants spread from Pleasantville, N.Y. to Glendale, Calif., while Chairman Hermann Place, a money man, handles the financial end. From $123 million in 1954, sales rose to $185 million in 1957, but extraordinary research and development expenses on military contracts cut earnings from $5,500,000 to $4,300,000.

Exploring the Sea. The biggest chunk of the company’s sales comes from its avionics subsidiaries. The hottest new product: a 2-cu.-ft. black box (Hidan), that enables a pilot in a plane to know exactly where he is at all times. With it, pilots can take off from any airport in the U.S. and fly to another, guided only by the signals from the black box.

A few years ago, tireless Inventor Link took up another hobby—deep-sea diving. Already, Link has co-developed a deep-sea diver’s underwater scooter, a torpedo shaped like a hotel hallway’s fire extinguisher that tows a diver along behind. Link is building a 91-ft. Diesel yacht specifically designed for undersea exploration with such gadgets as an underwater metal locater for hunting wrecks and buried treasure, so sensitive it picks up tin cans. Next year, Link hopes to use the boat to explore the sunken Roman seaport of Caesarea, off the coast of Israel.

While flying and deep-sea diving may seem a long way apart, Link says they are not. “In the water and in the air navigation is the main problem, and the main fascination. I simply have applied what I’ve learned about air navigation to the sea.”