Winch launching can be much more dangerous than aerotow if you don't have
the proper training and stay current. If you have a club with both winch
launching and aerotow, and members focus on one or the other, you're fine.
The problem is with a typical pilot who only flies one or two times a week
and occasionally plays around with winches.

Many US clubs are relatively small compared to some European operations. On
a busy day, we have maybe 20 people show up. On a typical day, we don't
even have enough interest to get all 5 of our club gliders onto the flight
line. There's no way, in that environment that you are going to have enough
manpower and interest to haul out the winch and the tow plane. The
inevitable result is that the winch will only come out for special
occasions, and someone is going to get hurt.

And that doesn't even go into the economic issues, where the big
attractiveness of the winch is to completely eliminate the costs associated
with owning and operating a tow plane.

Mike Schumann

"Del C" wrote in message
...
Why not? Many European clubs offer both winch and aerotow
launches, including my own. Some members only ever
aerotow and some (usually the less well off) only winch
launch. Most members do both, depending on the conditions,
what they can afford, and what they want to do. A winch
launch costs less than a third of the cost of an aerotow,
so it is a cheap way of staying current during the
winter when it is rarely thermic in the UK. About
two-thirds of our launches are on the winch, so we
can make do with fewer tug aircraft than would be the
case if we were an all aerotow operation.

The only safety issue is to make sure that aerotows
and winch launches don't happen at the same time, to
eliminate the risk of the tug flying into the winch
cable. We have a 'launch point controller' to make
sure that this is the case.

Del Copeland

At 03:42 29 December 2007, Mike Schumann wrote:

snip
In order to be a safe and successful with winch launching,
you need to make
a 100% commitment. You can't run winches and tows
in parallel, if people
are going to get and stay proficient in winch launching.
In addition, the
only way winches are economically justifiable is if
you totally eliminate
the overhead, operating, and maintenance costs associated
with a tow plane.








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