On Saturday, March 14, 2020 at 9:00:06 AM UTC-4, Dave Walsh wrote:
At 14:53 08 March 2020, wrote:
On Saturday, March 7, 2020 at 10:20:05 AM UTC-6, Emir Sherbi
wrote:
Actually, that is not the worst of the ideas. Safer than other
ideas for
sure.
Mixed with the idea of the compound pulley and truck the hole
does not
need to be too deep

As I mentioned before, anyone heard of the Wright Brothers and
their 1903
Flyer? Pretty quick acceleration to flight speed over a short
distance.

Well as it's raining: the idea of a (large) hole in the ground with
high speed wire motion around it on an active airfield doesn't seem
to have much going for it. Be an interesting 'Health & Safety'
problem. It would be a non starter in the UK - it would be full of
water by now.

The idea of dropping a weight into a hole - i.e. a dried-up oil-well in Texas - was discussed ad nausea in the winchdesign forum a couple of years back. The biggest issue is the control-ability of such a setup.
Personally, I find the idea of building a small winch to launch FES-equipped gliders just off the ground only to push precious electrons through the motor to gain altitude, a pretty bad one. Use a manly winch and do a normal winch launch and keep them precious electrons on one side of the battery!

Uli
'AS'