Your comments fit in my own experience at a fairly small club I've spent
most of my time at.

With around 60 members there are only about 8 to 10 who are "cleared" for
the winch.
Instructors do not winch unless it's a special occasion or a really quiet
day. There really
isn't enough of them to waste on the winch anyway!

Putting someone on the winch for a full day has/is resulting in loosing
these people to
other activities (i.e. not gliding). The other problem with such a low
number of trained
people is that the winch duty comes around every 4 weeks. And also what
happens is
that if you turn up to fly and the duty man isn't there, you end up on the
winch all day
again. If you've gone to fly and end up working, it's extremely
demotivating.

I agree with your thoughts that a winch man is intimately involved in every
launch, its a very
responsible job and takes quite a bit of skill to complete correctly. As to
the point that
some individuals don't make good winchmen, absolutely right every time!
These
people seem uncordinated and unaware of what's happening around them, and
they seem
to fly that way. Almost an accident waiting to happen I guess.

Cheers, Malcolm..

"Bruce" wrote in message
...
Ian Johnston wrote:
On Sat, 2 Jul 2005 10:39:35 UTC, Bruce wrote:

: We have a better rule - no solo in glider before solo on winch...

It's not a bad idea, but it can and does (in my experience) lead to clubs
with large numbers of not-very-good winch drivers. I'd much rather be
launched by someone who has done dozens or hundreds of launches than
someone who does a few every few weeks to satisfy club rules.

Ian, winch-but-not-any-other-sort-of-instructor
Ian

We average around 26-35 launches a day. With a small club and the
instructors doing less winching (although everyone including the CFI
drives winch) this means that our students, and solo pilots get to do
plenty of winch driving.

Instructors can expect to spend some time on the winch - maybe 5 or 10
launches, once every quarter. Although we have one who volunteers just
about ever time he is there - he just loves playing tunes with that V8...
The others will share the launching, on average doing around 8 launches on
any given day. It is not onerous, everyone shares the work and pitches in,
and the experience on the winch means the low time pilots have a better
understanding of what is going on. There are days when one of the more
experienced types installs him/herself in the winch and makes the day go
smoothly, and the inexperienced types get a benchmark to aim for. But if
we did that every week we would soon lose the "really good" winch drivers.
Spending a few hours seeing how well you can get the winch to perform,
every now and then is one thing,(and can be very rewarding) but we all go
to the airfield to fly...

Our experience is that there are a few individuals who never make
satisfactory winch drivers. With few exceptions they also struggle with
the flying part. You learn a lot observing someone on the winch. And
driving the winch in all the different conditions accelerates learning, he
may not be flying, but the winch driver is intimately involved in every
launch.

--
Bruce Greeff
Std Cirrus #57
I'm no-T at the address above.