Advertising for tow pilots

On Friday, September 25, 2015 at 9:06:01 PM UTC-6, Sarah wrote:
On Friday, September 25, 2015 at 8:20:30 PM UTC-5, wrote:
As often happens this discussion has gone off track from my original request. While discussion of pilot qualifications is useful, my original post was ASKING HOW AND WHERE TO ADVERTISE to recruit tow pilots.

I'd be willing to put up free postings or even pay advertising if I knew it would be seen by reasonably qualified candidates. I just don't know where to ask or advertise, got any ideas?

thanks
Chris

You could contact your local EAA chapters --- and maybe get a notice put in their newsletter or email distributions: http://www.eaa.org/apps/chapters/chaptermap.aspx

You could also put up postings on your local grass-airport bulletin boards. These airports tend to attract tail-wheel types.

Expanding a bit on what Sarah suggests, engage other flying clubs and flight schools in the area.

These may introduce you to interested persons and they may also find getting a glider rating attractive.

However, be prepared to grow your own tow pilots. The suggestion that they have a glider rating is a good one. I think we may have one tow pilot that doesn't hold a glider rating. My chapter waives dues for active tow pilots. The commitment used to be two duty days a month. To me, this is wrong headed because for several years they didn't enforce that rule. Charge dues and credit back 50% per day served. Our tow pilots received a show up stipend and small remuneration per tow. Gas money for the sometimes long commute.

The no dues, no joining fee bit us once. A couple of guys signed up, got checked out, and departed with the endorsements. Subsequent tow pilot members have paid the joining plus a deposit that were refundable after a year of acceptable performance. The dues thing is still on the dumb side. Modern accounting programs make management trivial.

Rookie mistakes. I'm aware of at least three rookie mistakes that resulted in two Pawnees on their nose and a Super Cub on its back (that wasn't a rookie IIRC. Not sure about the recent ground loop.). I'm not a tow pilot, but I do drive our club winch as much as possible. I've walked and driven over every inch of our gliderport a number of times. It's not flat, but undulating, and the vegetation changes seasonally. I've encountered calving antelope, badgers, skunks, llamas, roaming pronghorn herds, and other critters on the ground. We've hooked hidden debris (including a car seat) and tie downs (cross runway) with the steel wire rope (setting at least one grass fire) and now UHMWPE rope over the years. We've lost strops and rings for up to four years in the prairie grass. One may still be on the other side of the Interstate. However, we usually find the missing items within days or weeks despite missing them in organized searches.

The Pawnees that ended up on their noses hit runway edges or parking berms. Like I said, rookie mistakes, as they added enough throttle to complete the upsets. What the chief tow pilots may have failed to do was walk the pilots to and from the launch area to the hangars a couple of times. Thus the budding tow pilot careers were nipped in the bud unnecessarily. Do yourselves a favor. Walk the route, and alternate routes, a time or three. I'm sure the newbies were quite prepared to do the tows.

I'm not aware of any way to advertise. However, it may pay off to do some grunt work. You'll need MS Access or skill with MySQL or similar. Download the FAA Airmen Releasable Database. You will have to join or create a view of the personal data and the ratings data and construct a query or SQL statement to filter for SEL and glider ratings, including private and commercial. Filter by your state, then by neighboring states, or by zip codes. Your SSA state governor(s) can get a list of SSA members to help filter further. I may be able to help with expired SSA members. With this information you may find inactive glider pilots who have had towing experience and maybe now would be a good time to return to the sport as both glider and tow pilot. It will take time and effort. I once did a query on North Dakota (looking for an SSA governor candidate, without success). What I did find was 55 pilots with glider ratings. 11 were CFI-G's! I suspect some may have flown at times with the Winnipeg Gliding Club. Others may have flown with a South Dakota group. One was an OTR trucker. He usually flew at commercial operations in California and Arizona.

That said, I don't think your task is easy, but it isn't ominous. The hard part is finding a phone number or e-mail for each pilot you can list. But a bit of smart searching on the Internet can get a result 80-90 percent of the time.

Frank Whiteley
970-330-2050 7am-10pm MDT