The decline of gliding - a worldwide issue?

On Sunday, 14 March 2021 at 01:04:39 UTC, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Sat, 13 Mar 2021 16:19:14 -0800, waremark wrote:

I have carefully considered the pro's and con's of buying a self-
launching K21 and have concluded that it does not make any sense to
operate one or two of those alongside a fleet of tugs and pure gliders.

Out of pure curiosity, why would you consider using self-launching K-21s
when you have at least one winch?


Our field is much smaller than yours. A typical winch launch height is 1,000 foot, and there is a long ground retrieve from the normal landing area to the launch area. So the winch is productive in terms of numbers of launches from the site if their are several gliders using it and enough people on the ground for efficient operation, but it is not productive for an individual student. We do not use it for trial lessons or introductory flights where we want people to have longer in the air.

For an individual student, a self-launcher which can taxi back to the launch area after landing would enable the sort of booked session typical at a power club - say 2 hours at the airfield for one hour of flying time. For delivery of introductory flights, an individual instructor could quite easily do two 20 minute flights per hour.