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.
The museum is housed in one of four once-opulent mansions on the 216-acre preserve — scenes from the HBO series “The Gilded Age” are filmed in one of the others. Charles Lindbergh was a guest — Bosgang said that Lindbergh wrote his memoir “We” while staying there. The Navy arrived after World War II, and with it Adm. Luis de Florez.
Henry Okraski, the author of “The Wonderful World of Simulation,” said that de Florez “gave birth to the idea of simulation,” although de Florez called it “synthetic training.” He was in charge of the Navy’s Special Devices Center and moved it to Sands Point, where as many as 800 civilians worked alongside the military staff in the 1950s and 1960s. Among them were scientists from Operation Paperclip, a postwar intelligence operation that brought scientists and engineers who had worked in Nazi Germany to this country.
But the blue-box simulator, also known as a Link trainer, had been developed earlier.
“Even before the war, they used that trainer to teach the Army Air Corps to deliver the mail” in the 1930s, Okraski said. “The people who were delivering the mail were having a lot of crashes in foul weather. You can simulate rough air in there, like if there’s a storm. It’s very basic, but at the time, it was the technology.”
The Link simulator began as an amusement-park ride. It was supposed to pitch and roll to give people the feeling of flight, just as a bucking bronco ride gives the sense of a rodeo. Edwin Link, who developed it, had begun as a technician in his father’s piano and pipe-organ factory, “but while his hands were busy with automatic musical instruments, his heart was in the sky,” according to a monograph by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
His experience with the difficulties in the days of barnstorms prompted him to look for a way to train pilots on the ground in conditions that would prepare them for cloudy or foggy weather — or turbulence.
Okraski said Link had built the first blue boxes with parts from the organ-building company. “It all works on bellows,” he said, with air rocking the little fuselage in response to the pilot’s commands.
“It’s almost like a Bobblehead,” said Paul Dooley, a maintenance worker at the museum who was touching up paint on the cover around the bellows. “It’s free-floating in every direction.”
Okraski, who worked for the Navy as a civilian at Sands Point in the 1960s, said the Link trainer was “a game-changer in World War II.” More than 10,000 were manufactured, he said, and they were used to train 500,000 pilots.
You can’t “fly” the blue box at the museum — it’s behind a velvet rope. But you can try the flight simulator across the room. Bosgang set a flight path over Manhattan. After a turn that didn’t go well, I crashed into my own apartment building. Don’t tell my neighbors.
Weather
Today will be sunny with temperatures reaching the high 60s and a gentle to moderate breeze. Tonight, expect a mostly clear sky, a temperature in the mid-40s and gusting winds.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Monday (Veterans Day).
The latest Metro news
In the city
Sheltering on subway cars: A man shot another man on an Upper West Side street before fleeing into a nearby subway station, forcing passengers to shelter in place.
Deadline: Exasperated with Rudy Giuliani over delays in satisfying a $148 million defamation judgment, a federal judge directed the former mayor to hand over possessions by the end of next week or face a charge of civil contempt.
Life in prison: Cory Martin, a pimp who dismembered a woman working as a prostitute in Queens, was sentenced to life in prison. Prosecutors said he had chosen his victim after watching “Dexter,” a television drama about a serial killer.
More election news
Democratic pickup on Long Island: Laura Gillen, a former town supervisor in Nassau County, defeated Representative Anthony D’Esposito, bolstering Democrats’ hopes of ending up with a majority in the House.
A narrow loss in New Jersey: Donald Trump lost New Jersey by five points, signaling a rightward shift in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans and control every branch of government.
Ballot measures approved: New York City voters approved four out of five ballot measures proposed by the Charter Revision Commission, despite efforts to cast them as an unwarranted power grab by Mayor Eric Adams.
Senate milestones: Andy Kim will become the first Korean American in the Senate and its third-youngest member, after a tumultuous campaign that grew out of a former New Jersey senator’s corruption scandal.
On its way to Rockefeller Center
With the election behind us, you may be looking ahead to Thanksgiving (and dreading conversations about who voted for whom). Eric Pauze is looking ahead to Christmas.
He is the head gardener for Rockefeller Center, which makes him the person who chooses the holiday tree.
The one he picked for 2024 is a 74-foot-tall Norway spruce that was in West Stockbridge, Mass. It was cut down on Thursday. “Looks good all the way around,” Pauze said by cellphone after the tree was on its way to New York. “Has a great shape to it.” It is to arrive on Saturday and, after being decorated with 50,000 lights, will be lit on Dec. 4.
Pauze had his eye on it since July 2020, when he was casing another tree and spotted this one. He knocked on the door of the house it towered over. “I said I would like to keep an eye on it for a couple of years, let it grow a little bit and swing back by,” he said, adding that the owner, Earl Albert, had agreed to donate it when the time came.
Pauze said that when he had gone back to check on it, “it looked better every time.” He began watering and feeding it in April after deciding it was the tree for 2024.
On one of his visits, Pauze said, Albert’s daughter-in-law Shawn Albert told him that his first visit had come two days after Albert’s wife, Lesley, had died. “Everyone thought your coming was her telling everybody everything’s going to be all right — she loved that tree,” Pauze quoted Shawn Albert as saying.
METROPOLITAN diary
That Hurts
Dear Diary:
After a night out at the theater, my adult son and I were making our way through Times Square while trying to avoid the usual hawkers and hucksters.
One guy was particularly persistent in trying to persuade us to go to a comedy club. We were waiting for the light, so there was no quick escape.
We tried, politely but firmly, to convince him that he was wasting his time.
By the time the walk sign came on, I was bracing for some colorful invective. Then I heard the ultimate New York insult.
“I hope they raise your rent!” he yelled.
— Ann Brodsky
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Tuesday. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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