The Douglas County Composite Squadron (Minden) of CAP has one or two auto-tow clinics every year. We find them a good way to introduce ground launch operations to the CAP members, but also find them pretty labor intensive, hard on tow vehicle and rope, and more of a novelty than a good way to launch gliders.

By labor intensive, I mean we have at least three people in the tow vehicle (a 4WD pickup truck with auto transmission in tow mode so it doesn't try to shift into 4th gear). The three people are driver, person beside driver who communicates with glider and launch crew, and person in the back who can release the rope in an emergency or at the end of the run. Then we have a wing runner, a signal person beside the wing runner to communicate between the truck and the glider, and a driver for a retrieve vehicle that hooks onto the glider end of the rope to pull it back to the launch position. That's a lot of people, and we could ideally operate with one or two less, but in CAP we want to involve everyone.

We use a 2000' long rope on a 6000' long runway (we actually use a hard dirt area beside the runway because there are lights on the runway that would suffer if we tried to auto tow there). We generally get 900-1100' altitude on launch, depending on wind and the pilot's skill. We have a specially fabricated tow hook that fits into the truck's receiver hitch. It has a swivel so the hook is always aligned with the rope and a Tost release at the end.

Having the pilot drop the rope where it will fall over the tow area is essential for us, as we have obstacles to each side (runway lights to the north and a chain link fence to the south). I remember one retrieve when the pilot dropped the rope in such a place that the wind carried it over the chain link fence. That one lasted one and a half hours.

Despite the fact that most flights are 5-10 minutes long (we are, after all, practicing launch, not soaring) we generally don't get more than 15 launches out of an 8 hour day. I think the most we've ever gotten was 25 launches. That gives you an idea of how long staging, launching, retrieving and re-staging takes. Not as efficient as we might be, but we've been doing it for 3 years so we aren't neophytes at it.

Bottom line for me: it is a good way to introduce CAP members to a different method of launch, and it adds a lot of flights to the glider (CAP wants us to get 200 flights a year in order to keep the glider), but it has its own limitations and is not quite as easy as it might sound.

Fred