Behind the Glory. Ted Barris
in training. “Some of the more jealous non-air crew types bruited it about that the white flash indicated that the man was under treatment for syphilis.”
The white flash meant a lot to ex-infantryman John Clinton. “It indicated you were air crew. That was important. You were on your way. . . . We took advantage of it with the ladies.”
It was also the first time LAC Clinton felt completely inspired by what he was doing. He came from a family of United Empire Loyalists and had just scraped through high school with a “50.1 percent average. I had no motivation at all. But suddenly at ITS, this was sort of it,” Clinton said. “I enjoyed everything about ground school. We learned meteorology, math, principles of flight. I’m not sure what my marks were, but somewhere in the high 70s or low 80s.”
High marks strengthened a Leading Aircraftman’s hand for the coming selection process, yet there was still one other stiff challenge to meet at ITS—the Link trainer. “It was just like an airplane,” Clinton remembered. “The Link trainer had a fuselage, wings, and an open cockpit with all the normal controls,” but it was a simulator that never left the ground.
The Link trainer and its inventor, Edwin Albert Link, might never have enjoyed the prominence they did had it not been for the near desperate need of the BCATP in late 1939. Edwin Link had grown up during the 1920s in Binghamton, New York. Half the time he worked in his father’s organ and piano factory, the other half he learned how to fly. But flying lessons were very expensive at the time—$25 an hour. So, in 1929, Link patented a cockpit-like contraption with a simulated instrument panel and control stick, all of which floated on a set of organ bellows he had borrowed from his father’s factory. The result simulated the movement of an aircraft in flight.
In the 1930s Edwin sold six simulators to Casey Jones at the Curtiss-Wright aircraft company. Then he took a prototype to Washington with an idea that the United States Army Air Corps might be interested. When that venture fell through, he decided to raise the Link’s profile by installing one in the Long Island town of Rye, as an amusement ride for a quarter a flight.
One of Link’s contemporaries, New York test pilot and instructor Jack Charleson, contended that “if you could fly this unstable little monster, you could fly a stable airplane in straight and level flight.” In January 1940, that notion captured the imagination of Air Vice-Marshal Robert Leckie, on loan from the RAF as the director of training for the BCATP. Leckie decided to buy 200 Link trainers, “an unheard-of order at the time.” The first fifty were made in the United States and subsequent ones in Ontario at a factory near Gananoque.
Leckie’s order proved to be a turning point for the Link trainer, which is credited with training more than two million military and commercial pilots. And for the infant BCATP, without a large supply of training aircraft at its disposal, the Link trainer became an essential training tool for determining potential pilots and for honing basic instrument skills—that is, flying with only a turn-and-bank indicator, a magnetic compass, and an air speed indicator.
“They had a cyclorama—a circle of boards about ten feet high and about forty feet in diameter,” John Clinton said, remembering the Link trainer room. “It had painted scenery and a horizon on it, as if you were looking out over the landscape. They would start up the motor. If you pressed the rudder control it would turn in that direction. [When you manipulated the control column] it would bank, and the nose would come up or go down, just like an airplane. It was amazing.
“The instructor would sit over to one side with a recording device hooked up. One session took about twenty or thirty minutes. It really could give you the idea of coordinating the controls of an airplane. The first time [though], I was just all over the place. I couldn’t coordinate the turning and the nose. I came out soaking wet, I had been trying so hard. I remember telling myself I had blown it, that I would probably be washed out [of the course].” *
Clinton eventually mastered the Link as well as a score of other training and operational aircraft. He served three years as a flying instructor in Training Command and then flew missions for the South Atlantic Ferry Command and Transport Command.
“The Link was extremely sensitive, as sensitive as any aircraft,” said Link instructor Dick Tarshis. “It did everything that the aircraft would do. If you made a mistake in the air, it was serious; if you made a mistake and crashed the Link, it was only on paper.”
Tarshis’s job as Link instructor kept him close to the airplanes he loved but could not fly. As a boy he had spent his summers at a cottage on Hanlan’s Point on the Toronto Islands, where he watched aircraft of all shapes and sizes taking off and landing at the Island Airport. After high school he worked with Regal Films, the Canadian outlet for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, booking Hollywood movies into Toronto theatres. This job helped pay for flying lessons, and by 1938 Tarshis had his private pilot’s licence. When he enlisted, the RCAF put him on a train to Brandon, Manitoba, for Manning Depot, to Carberry, Manitoba, for guard duty, and on to ITS at Regina. The Link was never a problem. It was Tarshis’s incurable air sickness at Elementary Flying Training School that did him in.
“I tried everything, triple bromides, everything,” Tarshis said. “But the medical officer at EFTS said that my system just couldn’t stand it. And eventually, I was washed out. I felt very badly when I realized I wasn’t going to be a military pilot. So I took my discharge out of the air force, but I came back a year later as a Link trainer instructor.” By the war’s end he had instructed for about 2,700 hours and worked with nearly 2,000 RCAF students on the Link.
“There were probably twelve Link trainers in a room,” Tarshis explained. “The student would report to me, then walk up the steps into the Link. I’d start up the motor for the bellows, go back to my desk, communicate with the student by headphones, tell him to demonstrate level flight, climbing, gliding, and basic turn and banking moves. Then I would record his manoeuvres at my desk.
“Inside the Link was an exact replica of an aircraft [cockpit], with an instrument panel that lit up, a regular stick, and rudder pedals. If the student moved the stick, it would let out air on one side and so it would bank. The student also knew that if he made a turn, the outer wing would go faster than the inner wing, and he could stall and spin to the ground. The Link would actually rotate and spin, so the student had to get control, do the right things and bring it out of the spin. It was just like really stalling an aircraft. It really created all the hazards of flying, without leaving the ground.”
Flying capability, as the instructor viewed it, was partly a product of instinct and partly a matter of hand-eye-foot coordination. For LACs such as Chuck McCausland, who had played half-back for the Queen’s University Golden Gaels in the 1930s, or Jeff Mellon, who had played semi-professional lacrosse with the Hamilton Tigers, the Link trainer was “a piece of cake.” Nor was the manipulation of the control column and rudders a problem for young airmen such as Harvey Timberlake, who had driven a car from the age of twelve.
Later on in the life of the BCATP, Link training took on a new dimension when instructors installed a hood over the cockpit so that the pilot had to fly by instruments only, as he would in bad weather or at night. Decorated fighter pilot Jackie Rae recalled a day of training in the Link, when “I was doing my exercises with the coupe-top closed, so that I was flying absolutely blind. I was doing everything well, I thought, until [in my headphones] I heard this horrible crash. My instructor had taken a strawberry box, held it up to his microphone, and squashed it. It made the most terrible noise. I jumped a foot inside the Link. Then he said, ‘You have just landed 300 feet under the ground.’ I guess I had taken my eyes off the altimeter . . .”
The struggles of airmen coping with this peculiar craft moved one Link student to record his observations in poetic form in spring 1940. Having been a newspaper editor in Val d’Or in northern Quebec, airman Carrol McLeod described the antics of the Link and its students in an exaggerated Habitant accent. The result was a poem entitled “Dat Goddam Bird de Link,” and included the lines:
For two t’ree mont’ my brudder Pierre,
Take course on “Link” to fly de h’air
Dat “Link” she’s plane of speciale make,
On first