Wing Launch - Can it pull your wings off?

The debate on the merits and technicalities of winch launching will
rage on ad infinitum as it has for years in the winch newsgroups.
However, in terms of winch safety the statistics for the UK and
Germany are very different. Winch launching on the Continent shows a
much lower accident rate than the British experience. In other cases a
mishandling of statistics paints an out-of-focus picture. For example
an article published in Soaring magazine a while back quoted
statistics from a very small sample group to make a point about winch
safety. The article was very much off-base and was a poor piece of
work based on insufficient data. *The German study, however, does
appropriately apply statistical analysis to an appropriate sample
size.

Glad you brought this up, I also didn't like that article. My main
problem was less the sample data size, but rather the timeframe it
represented. It lumps all the statistics going back to the 60s into
single figures when it should really be separated into at least 2 or 3
different 'eras' for that same timeframe, when various gliding
authorities and groups identified common problems and implemented
standardized solutions that were game changers. Also, modern winches
are orders of magnitude more powerful and more importantly quite
controllable. That combined with material advances (UHMW etc) further
separate modern winching from it's roots.

Modern winching is pretty much a science and has come a long way since
the 60s so it does not do the soaring community (US at least...) a
favor to combine it all into single raw statistics cause it paints a
negative biased picture based on irrelevant data. It would be like
combining accident data from the era before seatbelts and airbags with
modern car accident statistical data, and then using that to form
statistics/articles to help potential future drivers decide how safe
cars are.

-Paul