Bob,
I also believe Tad is willing to dedicate immense amounts of his time investigating and testing towing equipment.
Not so much now. I've already dedicated those immense amounts of time, effort, and expense and I'm not all that interested in documenting the shittiness of every piece of crap that some moron wants to bend and solder together when all you need to do is look at for half a second. We've already developed excellent equipment and a new idea has gotta be as good or better before I'm gonna blow the dust off the test rig.
Unfortunately, Tad's efforts have not been appreciated by the "establishment" of the sport, and I believe that he's been mostly ignored by them.
Nah. My efforts have been mostly brutally suppressed by the establishment.
It's just like flying a hang glider. If you want a right turn, and the glider is going left, then you add increasing control inputs until you get the response you want.
And sometimes you gotta pull a defective spar out of the airframe, take a tubing cutter to it, find a new job for it as lawn furniture, and replace it with something appropriate for the task.
They hope for that pattern because that makes it easy to say the person is just a "complainer" or a "nut".
It's a little tougher to do that after the Chairman of the Towing Committee has asked said complainer or nut to help him revise the USHPA aerotowing SOPs.
Tad, I believe this forum (and the US Hawks forum) were both created by people who want to listen fairly to everyone.
With respect to Kite Strings... Depends upon what you mean by "fairly" and "everyone". If someone's just beaten a fourteen year old black kid to death on the allegation that he looked sideways at a white woman I don't wanna discuss anything fairly with him. If I know that the "justice" system isn't gonna do anything about it and I know I can get away with it I'm gonna shoot the sonuvabitch in the back of the head and feed him to the alligators.
There are people who study people.
Hitler, Stalin, tobacco executives, flight park operators...
Guess which group controls which towing systems people actually use.
Albeit not many - but people ARE actually using my tow equipment. And how I say things has absolutely no bearing on the number of users. The people who control the runways are the people who control what gets used on the runways. And I don't control any runways.
But how you say it is important to having those better towing systems actually saving lives.
I'm not THE LEAST BIT INTERESTED in saving the lives of people who give a rat's ass how I say things. Quite the contrary in fact.
I had Zack get in touch with Antoine to get him to contact me at the beginning of the month to save him from himself and assholes like Davis, Head Trauma, and Jim Gaar. They can pretend to be competent, rational, intelligent, reasonable people 'cause they've created environments for themselves in which anyone with half a brain or better who challenges them on anything is permanently eliminated from the conversation.
With respect to the current topic - one point aerotow - those aforementioned assholes and their ilk have about nine ways to kill somebody on their shitrigged bridle/release systems that Steve Kinsley and I have eliminated or never built in in the first place. So I would LOVE to help Antoine but he's free to do whatever the hell he feels like and I'm not gonna lose a wink of sleep if he gets bit.
I've got a magic wand. I can save Zack or a hundred Davis, Jack, Peter Birren, Adam, Head Trauma, Tracy, Matt, Steve Wendt, Paul Hurless, Brian Horgan, Richard Bryant sorts of people. How many gliders do you think are gonna be strapped to racks this evening?
(Hint: I'll take quality over quantity any day.)