On Saturday, February 10, 2018 at 10:14:30 AM UTC-5, Waveguru wrote:
I know of a winch site that sighs off pilots for solo without doing a single rope break practice, and only a hand full of dual tows. I wonder how Matt was trained?

Boggs

Boggs,
that may hold true for the US but in Europe, winching is the predominant launch method for gliders due to the high cost of AVGAS and operating power planes. It is very likely that Matt was trained on the winch up to first solo, which would have included launch failure training ad nausea - at least that's how it was handled in my club in Germany.
Uli
'AS'