Ray

Winching often involves a winch driver all on his/her (yes we do have them) own
at the faaaar side of the field. As long as you rotating winch driving duties it
is no penance to spend some time with the monster. Brief petrol head interludes
interrupting some serious, enforced, solitude. This is another thing to get the
pleasure of learning to do well in diverse conditions.

Our winch is typically on the down hill, out of sight of the launch point with
nothing but grass and birds for company. I don't know how well this would work
in a society where everything tends to get regulated and managed to death, but
it works well for us. One of the attractions of soaring for me is to get some
time away from other people...

Aerotow is OK , but in my opinion, less fun. At an average of 8 winch launches /
aerotow in cost you have to be really bad at picking thermals to end up worse
off. If you fail to get away you get to have another roller-coaster ride. No
hardship.

The only thing that aerotow offers most of us is the ability to get to lift if
it is too high or too far away from the launch point to be reachable from the
winch. If you are flying an open class ship or heavily ballasted racer the winch
is not such a good idea.

Bruce
Bill,

Oh, if we only had a winching legacy in the U.S.!
Blame those Wright boys from Dayton for inventing the
expensive towplane!

I would love for our club to have a two-drum winch
with about 5,500' of the new poly rope (rather than
the steel wire) on each drum and a couple of 'Lepo's'
to retrieve the rope. Of course, I wouldn't get rid
of the towplane we have, but supplement it with the
winch. I haven't been winched in about 20 years, not
because I don't want to, but because there isn't a
winch operation where I fly. But my first winch launch
(a 'cat' launch?) was in the back seat of a G103 and
I was elated and impressed. Wow, what a way to fly
a sailplane! Also nice was the lack of noise at the
start point. The wing runner picks up the wing, the
slack in the towline is taken up, then, the glider
is just wisked away. Somedays, we could hear the winch
and somedays we couldn't. Just ambient noise and the
glider is GONE. Now, we are subjected to towplane
noise and, in our situation, the noise of power planes
as they taxi by to take off. And, oh yea, they have
to do their engine run up about where we are staging
for launch. Noisy buggers.

Yep, a nice winch would be great and would make launching
A LOT cheaper!

Ray Lovinggood