Almost perfect payout winch launch.

In article ,
Tony wrote:



If you're using a pulley why not just have a release on the tow vehicle?

Hi Tony,

I was unclear about the pulley launch. The pulley is on the tow vehicle.
One end of the line is anchored, the line goes over the pulley to the
glider. The tow vehicle is pulling from the middle of the rope, going in
the same direction as the glider. The advantages are that acceleration
at the glider is almost as fast as a winch launch and the tow car only
has to go 25-30 mph maximum to launch the glider. No gear changes
required, and the low vehicle speed means it can be done on less than
paved surfaces. Launching with 4000 feet of dacron rope and an old LTD
with 500 lbs of bricks in the trunk used to get our Ka-8 to 2000' if we
had a bit of headwind.

A release can be put at the anchor point, but that's a long way from
where the action is.

There are some other disadvantages to this type of ground launch as
well. Turn around time is fairly long. Switching ends of the rope after
each launch can speed things up especially if the anchor point is
another vehicle. Rope recovery can be problematic since a chute is
usually not part of the rope end hardware, so the rope tends to fall a
ways downwind.