Some good dialogue in the thread. The winch discussions reminded me that I actually had a mix of aerotow and autotow (poor man's winch) in my early training. The auto tow was fantastic toward the end of my pre-solo training, since I could shoot 3-4 patterns in a row in rapid succession. In my club, it was very hard to get more than 2 aerotows in a single session due to the schedule constraints. With auto-tow, we could turn around 4 flights in one hour easily during a weekday without needing the towpilot.

So, do many European clubs have a formal process to do something like this? Use aerotow to get some air-time early on to develop the basic stick and rudder skills followed by winch to enable multiple patterns (circuits) cost-effectively.

Just curious,

P3