While at Bauhaus Eisenstein happens to catch a lecture by a young American engineer Edwin Link about his flight simulator design. The Link Trainer is a simulation of a cockpit with all the controls, but, in contrast to a modern simulator, it has no visuals.[6] Eisenstein conceives of adding a projected film to the simulator.

Link has connections in Hollywood; he arranges an invitation for Eisenstein so they have an opportunity to work on this new project in America. In Hollywood Eisenstein completes a twenty second film test. After meeting Disney, Eisenstein, who was in love with Disney cartoons, adds Mickey Mouse to the film. He send a print to Freud and a copy to Lissitzky who is now in Cologne. Lissitzky soon has to return to Russia. Sensing changing political climate there, he leaves his notes on the Navigator in Germany.

As many of Eisenstein's other projects, the Freud-Lissitzky navigator remains unrealized. There are notes in his archive dating to the late 1930s about constructing special movie theatres with moving platforms; he wants to use his montage theories to script the movement of a platform against other dimensions of a film. He also shoots a scene for Alexander Nevsky where we see the battle through the POV of a character who flies over the battle using the wings he constructed; but Stalin who understands that Eisenstein is making a reference to Russian avant-garde artist Tatlin's "Letatlin" (flying apparatus Tatlin has been developing for years) orders this scene to be cut.[7]