Winch Launch Safety Study

In message , Derek Copeland
writes
At 23:53 18 March 2009, bildan wrote:
On Mar 18, 12:30=A0pm, Derek Copeland wrote:

2) Obviously you have never watched a dangerously steep, overpowered,
over-rotation on a winch launch. I have!

No, I haven't seen any of the weird things you describe. They all
seem to happen in your immediate vicinity. I wonder why.

Probably because I'm a gliding instructor at a large and very busy club
that does a lot of winch launching. I also visit other clubs that winch
launch.

I should add that probably 99% of winch launches go to plan (including
deliberate practice launch failures by instructors) without any
difficulties. About 1% suffer cable or weak link breaks, or other
technical failures of one sort or another. Given proper training these
should be just an inconvenience, rather than an emergency situation.

I have over 300 winch launches - not many by some people's standards but
still a fair number. I have had only 1 genuine launch failure (caused
by the club member driving the winch, not by me or by equipment
failure), so either I'm due a run of cable breaks and the like, or the
percentage of failures is better for some pilots/ glider types than
others... (or a bit of both of course)

snip

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