Monthly Soaring Magazine Articles for 2026

January - The Mystery behind 200 ft? by Richard Carlson - SSF Chairman

Last month this column discussed the many reasons why your aerotow may not have gone the way you initially planned. The main point was that the traditional 'Rope Break' training at 200 ft AGL does not prepare your students or pilots for an actual aerotow launch failure. Instead, a more realistic failure mode is a partial power loss on the part of the tow plane. That guidance also applies to self launches and to some extent ground (winch) launches. Launch failures, both practice and actual require thought and pre-planning to achieve a successful outcome. Read the full article.

February - Abnormal Occurrence Training by Richard Carlson - SSF Chairman

This is the 4th article in our launch failure series. To quickly recap: The 1st article described the problem where over the past 15 years 40% of the launch failure accidents resulted in fatal injuries to the pilot. The 2nd article described multiple ways that an aerotow launch could fail, with few of them being the traditional 'rope break'. The 3rd article discussed why simply using 200 ft AGL as the sole decision criteria was not an adequate method for developing your emergency plan. This article discusses why a plan is required and how to begin train pilots to deal with these Premature Termination of the Launch (PTL) events. Read the full article.

March - Increasing PTL success rates by Richard Carlson - SSF Chairman

This is the last in our Premature Termination of the Launch (PTL) series, looking at how to increase the number of successful abnormal occurrence practice events (i.e.; that dreaded x00 ft rope break). Read the full article.