Lowest power tow

On Sun, 19 Jan 2020 08:06:08 -0800, AS wrote:

On Sunday, January 19, 2020 at 12:30:51 AM UTC-5,
wrote:
What's the lowest power tow plane you've ever seen or towed by? An
Examiner of mine said his was a C150 with 100hp. I also once saw
paperwork for an 85hp Luscombe to tow.

My club used to own a British-made Taylorcraft 'Auster'. It had an
inverted inline four (or six? - can't remember) engine which seemed very
underpowered. We soon switched to a 150HP Super-Cub, which made a huge
difference.

That engine would have been the De Havilland Gypsy Major, 130hp, four
cylinder inverted. It was fitted to a lot of 30s and 40s DH designs as
well as the Auster III, the most common Auster variant.

A lot of towing in the mid-50s in NZ, and probably in Britain as well,
was done with DH82 Tiger Moths, which all used the 130hp Gypsy Major
engine. As ex-wartime primary trainers they were plentiful and very
cheap. IIRC around 1950 you could pick them up for £25 in Britain. They
were also very common in Australia and NZ, where a lot were crashed in
early attempts at spreading superphosphate by air on hill pastures[*].

In 1958, in NZ, I remember getting a ride in a Schleicher
Ka-4 Rhonlerche. That was an aero-towed launch behind a Tiger Moth.
[*] Several years later, when Tiger Moths had been replaced by the
Fletcher FU-24 as the topdressing aircraft of choice, I remember seeing a
Cessna 180 with a bomb rack under each wing - this was an ill-advised
attempt to deliver fencing material on hill farms, the 'bomb' being a
bundle of angle-iron fence posts, etc. The problem was that the bundles
either arrived end-on and went in so far that it wasn't worth digging
them out or they landed sideways and rolled down to the bottom of the
hill, from where the farmer had to use a tractor/jeep/pack-horse to cart
them up the hill to where they were wanted. It was simpler and cheaper to
cart the fencing material up the hill along the same track the fencers
used, so that delivery method as soon abandoned.


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Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org