Winch vs Towing Accident Statistics

[youngbl...@gmail.com]

Our club is looking seriously into buying a winch, our new facility will have 5k feet of runway space and a winch may well be the platform to use in combination with the towplane. Does anyone have the accident statistics compared to towing. Old Bob, The Purist

[Martin Gregorie]

Drop a line to the BGA - they've got accident stats for all launch types
going back a long way.

http://www.gliding.co.uk/

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

[Bret Hess]

Here is a writeup I did of British data, and how they greatly reduced accidents and fatalities in the last 14 years.

Browning[#Browning2007SafetyBGA] did a study of the 391 British winch accidents from 1987 to 2004. While winch launch accidents are rare (1.1 fatal or serious per 100,000), he reported that the accident rate per flight in winch launching was 50% more frequent than in aerotow, and the rate of fatal or serious injury greater by a factor of 7. With the help of calculations by Hills[#Hills2007SafetyBGA], Browning offered guidelines[#Browning2007SafetyBGA] for safer winch launching which were adopted by the British Gliding Association, and are included in training materials [#2010DanielsBGAWinchTraining] by Bill Daniels. The safety improvement efforts paid off, with the accident and fatality rates falling by a factor of about 5 between 2006 and 2020. So with the modern launch practices, the rate of fatal or serious injury for winching is about 1.4 times higher than for aerotow, at a rate of about 0.2 per 100,000 launches.

[Bret Hess]

Rewriting the last sentence of the most recent data:

So with the modern launch practices, the rate of fatal or serious injury for winching is about 1.4 times higher than for aerotow, at a rate of about 1 per 500,000 launches.

[Craig Reinholt]

> Rewriting the last sentence of the most recent data:
>
> So with the modern launch practices, the rate of fatal or serious injury for winching is about 1.4 times higher than for aerotow, at a rate of about 1 per 500,000 launches.

Please remember that many European clubs that have winches require extensive training for their winch operators. The European safety record reflects this superior training requirement. In the US, nothing similar for winch operators. I have to believe that the accident rate will be (much?) greater without this requirement.
Material to read before winch purchase: https://members.gliding.co.uk/bga-safety-management/safe-winching/
Craig

[Bret Hess]

Craig or others do we have data that winch operator error is a significant contributor to winch accidents? I think the safety improvements that the BGA implemented were related to the pilots and wing runners, not at the winch end.

The BGA improvements in pilot training have made it to the USA through Bill Daniels and Don Ingram (and maybe others I don't know about). You can see Utah Soaring's adaptation of their materials in "USA Winch Training Guidelines" on https://utahsoaring.org/winch/. You might also be interested in "Winch Operations Standards" and "Winch Driving Standards"

[George Haeh]

The BGA offers excellent material on Safe Winch Launching. And they keep updating it. It's well worth rereading at least once a year.

We had visitors from other clubs last week. One managed to break a weak link with a rapid rotation not very high up. We have a more powerful winch. Happily he did not snap roll.

We had a discussion on a slower rotation not below 300'.

[Frank Whiteley]

On Monday, August 1, 2022 at 7:10:26 AM UTC-6, bret...@gmail.com wrote:
> Rewriting the last sentence of the most recent data:
>
> So with the modern launch practices, the rate of fatal or serious injury for winching is about 1.4 times higher than for aerotow, at a rate of about 1 per 500,000 launches.

I, and others, thought the ratio was a little high; that is, the BGA group included accidents where the winch launch, as a method, was really not a contributing factor in the resulting accident. However, I believe those were included in the numbers to overcome the complacency that was a large factor in the poor rate that drove the initiative. Thus, my considered opinion is, that without compromises, winch launching is quite safe. That said, it is human nature to make some compromises sometimes as a result of group think or peer pressure. This may result in operational challenges or in sad outcomes. Given the right approach, winching is a hoot, relatively inexpensive, and opens the door for growth and prosperity. It's been said that "a winch is a license to print money." It can certainly been done as safely in the US as any where else.

Frank Whiteley

[youngbl...@gmail.com]

I certainly agree with the opinion and see no reason that winch launching should not be a viable launching method in this country many of our club gliders or individual owned gliders do not have CG hooks, making that a possible problem. It would be interesting to know how many of the newly arriving sustainer motorgliders have CG hooks??? Old Bob, The Purist

[George Haeh]

Most gliders have provision for installation of a CG hook if not factory installed - or a forward hook for that matter.

My winch qualification was done on a 2-22 with a forward hook. You don't get as high.

The 27 with a CG hook is just about the easiest glider I've ever flown on aerotow - as long as the tow pilot gives me 65 kt.

With a nose hook, you get pitch and yaw couples. The yaw couple is extra workload in turns.

[Herbert Kilian]

Just a very subjective data point: I learned flying gliders exclusively on the winch in Germany, my club did about 3,000 launches annually. I was a winch driver, enjoyed doing that and have over 3,000 of them in my logbook. During my 7 years in the club (until we left for the US of A), we did not have one accident related to winch launching. There were 3-4 clubs in the vicinity of ours, some more acive than we. Again, no accidents in spite of rope and weak-link breaks. I spliced the broken steel cables more times than I want to recall ("real" splices, no clamps). German winch operation procedures seem to be pretty good.