| Subject: Re: Air crash near Boulder CO |
Author:
Dmitri
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Date Posted: 23:19:23 02/07/10 Sun
In reply to:
carlton
's message, "Re: Air crash near Boulder CO" on 22:50:47 02/07/10 Sun
In Rocinante, the tow rope stayed with the tow plane. The technology exists, at least now days, for the tow plane pilot to do the release and retain the rope. I don't know if it did in Rocinante days or not.
I live in Oregon in the middle of Christmas tree growing country. There's a several-day period just after Thanksgiving that I can watch them harvest Christmas trees out several windows of my house. The company that's next door to me hires a helicopter to get cut and bundled trees out of the field as it's usually very wet and muddy that time of year around here, and the trucks in the fields would rut them up pretty badly.
The helicopter has a cable maybe 25+ feet long or so hanging below the chopper with a big metal ball for weight at the end of the cable. There's a hook on a shorter cable below the weight. The chopper hovers above a bundle of trees, and a worker on the ground clips a line from the trees to the hook. The pilot raises and takes the bundle to a staging area and can hit a switch on the dash and release the bundle at any time, usually placing it and others in a stack near a truck to be loaded. They do this quite quickly, a bundle of a dozen or so trees about once a minute or so, depending on the size of the field.
The weight is to keep the line hanging below the chopper so it can't whip up on release of the load and foul the blades of the chopper. There have been instances where the cable has broken above the weight and crashed the chopper.
I suspect that the release is a simple mechanical linkage, but it could be radio controlled or done other ways, like an electrical solenoid or such.
At the sailplane end, the hook on the glider that the line hooks to would just have a similar release system. Either one being triggered would release the glider from the tow. The tow rope bouncing on the ground when the tow plane lands might be hard on release systems. Enough to preclude using them? Wes?
Dmitri
>>> If the towrope was released from the towplane this
>would put a large down force on the nose of the
>sailplane and make it head for the ground. Also the
>sailplane release of the towrope depends on the pull
>of the towplane to insure a clean release. not sure
>how the rope being released from the towplane would
>affect this. could the sailplane even release the
>rope? would the drag of the towrope on the sailplane
>even allow it to remain in the air?
>
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