Safety of winch launch vrs. aero tow?

"Chris Nicholas" wrote in message
...
The film clip posted by Andreas shows another sort of accident, i.e. it
seems not to have been caused by rotating too much and hence
insufficient energy to avoid a heavy landing. Instead it is one of the
accidents relatively common in winch launching - we do not see the
glider leaving the cable, but it clearly flies at an adequate airspeed
for some distance before spinning off a turn which is too steep, too
close to the ground, in the wind gradient, and too slow for that set of
circumstances. Without knowing the site one cannot say what the pilot
should have done instead, but it is rare for there not to be a "land
ahead" option with less serious potential after a low cable break or
launch failure.

As I remarked before, it is not the winch launch itself that usually
produces the accident, it is pilot mismanagement of the subsequent
flightpath.

The too-little-energy syndrome this thread had been discussing most
recently is pilot mismanagement during the launch - not having learned
properly how to avoid having too little energy to cope with any
eventuality.

Both kinds of pilot error seem hard to eradicate in civilian gliding
clubs, which leads to considerable numbers of "winch launch" related
statistics.

My understanding is that the Air Cadets in the UK, who do huge amounts
of winch launching, have a much better safety record. It is rumoured
that they achieve this by teaching in a more regimented fashion. However
they do it, it demonstrates that winch launching CAN be safe - the
problem is the human element, not the technology itself. The only way
the human element can be made safer is by better training etc.

If a wave of winch launching were to commence in the USA, I think it
would be difficult to avoid a wave of accidents following, unless the
training and conversion of pilots were done better than we often manage
in the UK civilian gliding world. I wish every success to the
instigators of the project, and I hope they can pick up enough know-how
to climb the learning curve safely.

Chris N.


Chris makes a good point.

There does seem to be a condition experienced by some people who find it
hard to make fast mental adjustments from one set of conditions to another.
One moment they are setting on the ground and 35 seconds later then are high
in the sky at the controls of a glider and struggling to cope. The rush of
a winch launch may create a sensory overload beyond their ability to manage.

This may be analogous to a well known condition experienced by some
motorists who enter a high speed expressway and find it hard to adjust to
the fast traffic for a while. (and, of course, the reverse when leaving the
expressway and entering slow surface traffic.) I have never experienced
this and know of relatively few who do.

If we were more alert to this possibility we might intervene and ask a pilot
showing these symptoms to get a little more recurrent training. Perhaps
this is something we instructors should emphasize in training. Instructors
should be alert to sensory overload in their students and pace their lessons
accordingly but things do happen quickly in a winch launch.

Bill Daniels