On Tuesday, August 7, 2018 at 7:45:24 AM UTC-7, Steve Koerner wrote:
This subject comes up every few years on RAS and that's a very good thing.. Long ago there was a death on tow with a heavily watered ship that I'm pretty sure was caused by this.

I have already posted a couple times in the past about my own near death experiences I have had dangling from a slow towplane at a remarkably low stalled tow position while slamming the stick back and forth against the stops in Ventus 1 and in ASW27. When this is happening at a very low altitude (as it was), then releasing is not an option.

Several have pointed up the necessity of communicating with the tow pilot.. I think it preferable to communicate in writing. Except at contests, I always make sure that the tow pilot has been handed my written towing instruction when I have water ballast. Here's a link to my little towing instruction sheet: https://goo.gl/PwVu71

Where to start. Believe it or not some places do not have comms with the tow plane other than hand signals. I believe the first place is to properly train tow pilots. A couple years ago at Nephi I had a tug where the pilot basically did a short field takeoff and started to climb! I was screaming at him to stay in ground effect as I had not even lifted off!! On the same tow I got into an argument with the pilot when I asked for another ten knots! "do you really want me to add ten knots".."Yes, for fu@ksakes". Years ago at my home airport we had a spat of extremely poorly trained tow pilots, fortunately now all of them are very well trained. As for written instructions, great idea, but I have yet to have a tow pilot actually read or follow the tow chit, other where I wanted to be released. ON my first tow out of Truckee, I filled out their tow chit and since I had not flown there before I checked the box for no thermaling on tow. I have about 1700 hours of glider time, I have never seen a tow plane bank it up 50 degrees to thermal at 800 feet, we played a game of crack the whip until I could dig the boom mike out from under my arm pit.