On Aug 16, 8:19*am, Andreas Maurer wrote:
On Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:56:16 -0700 (PDT), bildan
wrote:

That's basically what you get from the new winch
designs. *Easier, safer launches with greater performance.

Nope.

Dyneema is an exception. *It has been proven safer than steel cable by
every industry that has adopted it - there's lots of industrial safety
data on that. *Besides being safer, it's just way nicer to work with.

Hmmm... on my airfield (we were the first ones to use Dyneema) we
already had more than only a couple of incidents that were directly
related to the use of Dyneema and wouldn't have happened with steel
cable. We came to the conclusion that -at least on my airfield- steel
cable offers more advantages than disadvatages than Dyneema.

Cheers
Andreas

I very much doubt yours was the first airfield to use Dyneema since
that would have been in 1998 in Germany and I strongly suspect the
analysis of your incidents was seriously flawed. Dyneema is safer,
period. Airfields have no influence on that.

However, simply replacing steel with Dyneema and attempting to use the
same procedures as with steel will cause problems. Those are
transition issues, not Dyneema issues. The winch must be modified and
the operational rules must be changed to make a successful transition.