soaring into the future

On Dec 28, 12:37*am, Marc Ramsey wrote:
Dan G wrote:
A club which has bought a Skylaunch recently might have about 100
members paying £300 a year each and about £7 a winch launch, plus
around £25 an hour glider hire. An aerotow, btw, costs about £25 to
2,000'. What are US club membership numbers and costs like?

Our fees are similar ($600/year, $30/2000' tow, $20/flight), we have
fewer members (around 60, I believe), but the economics are quite
different. *We operate from a public airport, and have to rent a hangar
for the tow plane, along with space for glider tie downs and a club
house. *I don't know the exact figure, but I suspect airport rent alone
is as much as $1500/month.

Our site rent is three times yours, plus we pay staff costs (one full
time employee and a couple of part-timers both instructors and in the
office) and of course have costs on tow planes (two) as well. I think
there's two big differences, 1) you charge half the price per aerotow
we do (though our avgas is around $8 a gallon) and if $20/flight is
$20 for one hour, again we charge about double, and 2) we winch, doing
about 5,000 launches a year, with big profit on each one.

There might also be a third - we heavily promote "trial flights",
which cost about $150 and obviously have high margins. We aim for
something like 150 trial flights a year. Is there a US equivalent?

The tow plane and airport fees eat the majority of the fees collected.
A winch would be a great revenue generator and cut or even eliminate the
need for the tow plane. *However, it would require a big pile of money
(for us) up front, intensive training of instructors and members, cause
grumbling from the tow pilot members and those who like to tow miles in
search of better conditions, and we'd be likely be forced to move to a
location farther out from the population centers, resulting in a loss of
membership. *While a winch may be a "win-win-win-win" scenario, as a
practical matter it is difficult to implement at many sites in the US.

There's several ways of looking at this. Does you club do much ab
intio training or is it mainly established pilots? We have lots of
trainees at any one time (few become long-term members, there's a high
turnover), and we train them entirely on the winch. To go aerotow solo
they take a tow or two after solo.

You can also soar off the winch in the right conditions, but I find it
becomes hard once cloud base get to around 5,000' AGL. In Britain such
days are exceptional so I have a winch launch/soar rate of 93% :-).
I'm guessing your cloud bases are much higher.

Not sure how you'd get the pilot experience and competence for winch
launching though. Judging by the Winch Fest video, there's still a lot
of ground to cover to get to BGA safety standards, which have almost
eliminated winch launching accidents.


Dan