From the first 12 second powered flight by the Wright brothers in 1903 to the successful flight to the moon and back in 1969, and on to the remote controlled drones of today, pilots have the one thing in common: they had to learn how to fly. As the technology and efficiency of the flying training machines grew more and more sophisticated, so did the methods of training the pilots, but the challenges of flight have remained essentially the same. No matter how advanced the plane and pilot have become, there is still bad weather, equipment breakdowns, and that occasional mountaintop suddenly appearing out of nowhere.
Taking off and landing safely, protecting plane and passengers, reacting quickly and properly to any situation all hold as much importance as they did 100 years ago. With good flight training and practice, eventually a student would become a pilot, able to handle all these things automatically, in a professional manner. In the early days pilots were taught how to fly by first being a passenger, with the instructor explaining how he made use of the controls. The pupil would watch, learn, and memorize all the actions of his mentor, and then the student was simply put in the pilot’s seat to fly the plane.
This method was similar to learning how to swim by being thrown into the deep end of the pool. It could work, but the results could also be disastrous. Crashes were not uncommon; planes wrecked, bodies mangled, lives lost. It soon became obvious that repair of broken airplanes along with lost flight training time of future pilots was quite expensive, and so the concept of flight simulators was born. These intrepid men of yesteryear, being inventive by nature, and pressured to come up with a cheap solution to an expensive problem, figured out that an immobile object on the ground had a less fall than a rapidly moving object in the sky. So they rigged together a contraption that could simulate flying, but remain within the safe proximity of the ground.
The first pilot school flight simulators were rudimentary affairs, basically a chair on a gimbals or universal joint with cables attached to the controls to reproduce roll, pitch, and yaw. It was basic stuff, but still cheaper and safer than a plane crash, and it worked. After training on the simulators, the students were able to get into a plane and fly it safely with just refinement and the polishing of their skills necessary to make them pilots. As time went on, advanced flight training instruments were added, along with a co-pilot; the planes got more powerful and agile, and simulator technology had to keep pace with the ever-changing challenges of actual flight.
Electro/hydraulic machines replaced gimbals and universal joints. Scenes of land and sky were introduced, first with simple painted scenes, then progressing to increasingly more realistic moving images. The sensation of movement and turbulence could be accurately reproduced, and being in a simulator became as real as the actual flying of a plane. For flight training purposes, simulators would actually be superior to a plane because the student would encounter emergency situations at a much higher frequency, enabling him to make better, quicker, more automatic decisions later on.
With the coming of the computer age, flight simulation has advanced to the point of being so close to reality that a pilot can be licensed to fly with little or no actual flying time. In fact, it can be said that flight simulation has become the reality. Pilots now control drones from a safe, far-away, land-based cockpit; seeing the land and sky, the weather and night, even dodging the occasional mountaintop just like they always have. Except now, they don’t have nearly as far to fall. It gives a new meaning to the expression “flying by the seat of your pants.” These are some hidden truth behind the development of pilot training in advance level that give you a new way to understand this training process.
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