Bill Gallagher wrote:
In my student pilot days, I can recall seeing a sailplane taking off in tow as I was about 800 feet after take off on a Cessna 150. The tow rope snapped from the sailplane at a estimate elevation of 600 to 500 feet... The pilot of the sailplane make a extreme graceful left bank to position for a landing .... and landed like a Canadian Geese or a Swan you see in landing on a lake .... How beautiful some people recovery from a dangerous situation ..... grace under pressure ....never will forget it.....
The glide angle of a sailplane is such that recovery from a rope break at that altitude is usually no problem, unless you're being towed downwind from the airport. At the club I was in, we generally *practiced* rope breaks by releasing at 200-300 feet, and if a 180-degree turn was started immediately there was little drama involved. In fact, we had to use the spoilers pretty heavily to get down fast enough to land on the first part of the runway. I think it's hard for a pilot used to powered aircraft to visualize just how shallow the glide angle of a sailplane is...25:1 isn't uncommon for an older two-seat trainer.
A rope break at around 100 feet could still put you somewhere you really didn't want to be at our airport, but I never saw one happen at that altitude. I did see one happen at about 50 feet on a winch launch, though, and that was pretty exciting.
