I agree that you need a certain critical membership
mass to support both launching methods. However if
you can make gliding cheaper by the use of a winch
AND advertise the fact, especially on university and
college campuses, then maybe the clubs in the US will
get bigger. Many of our top UK competition glider pilots
started as members of university gliding clubs. They
are the ones who are more likely to have the disposable
income later on in life to be able to afford gliding,
if they are not priced out of it in the first place!


The other big source of new members in the UK are successful
middle aged empty nesters who are looking for something
to keep them occupied. From a club point of view they
are even better as, being older, they generally need
more flights to get up to solo standard, and often
go on to become committee members, bringing in valuable
business experience from the outside World.

Both groups have the time to help at the launch point.

I also agree that pilots need to be properly trained
in winch launching techiques, but you are making it
sound something akin to playing Russian Roulette! As
long as you approach winch launching with proper respect,
your brain in gear, and remember to do the 'eventualities'
check (what will I do if the wing drops, the cable
or weak link breaks, or the winch engine fails) there
is absolutely no reason to consider it dangerous. BTW
some poor fellow recently managed to cartwheel a glider
during an aerotow launch! So even they are not without
some risks.

We are lucky to see many of our members twice a month,
let alone twice a week, except on very soarable days!
We do have currency requirements, which vary from at
least once flight every three weeks for early solo
pilots up to eight weeks for very experienced pilots.
After that you will need check flights.

Del Copeland

At 06:12 29 December 2007, Mike Schumann wrote:
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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