Towing gliders

I’m a simple man with a simple job: drawing chickens. Granted, I also do all kinds of other graphic design work, but basically, I’m a one man show with a rather simple business model. But you wouldn’t believe the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork I have to put up with in my daily grind.

If you work in aviation you can stop laughing now. I bet I ain’t seen nothing in comparison to you, but my point stands! What does that have to do with today’s strip, you may ask. Well, I think a lot of society’s woes are a result of people like Chuck who, like in today’s strip, obey the letter of the law instead of the spirit. Some people even go so far and study how to most creatively circumvent the intention while obeying the letter of the law. Those people are called lawyers or accountants. So, in order to make the law work as intended, you need to add additional explanations and exceptions to it. The whole process turns into a feedback loop of lawyers on one side taking really simple rules and encoding them in multiple volumes of unreadable text. And on the other side, to decipher the text, you need another lawyer to translate it into the simple rule that was supposed to be served in the first place. It’s a racket, I tell you!

As an aside: Yes, I probably watched Family Guy before writing this strip. Also, the color scheme of Chuck’s glider is exactly like Mike and I’s first radio controlled gliders we built when we were kids. Mike’s gilder worked quite well, actually. But mine would also have to have been tied to a Cessna to stay in the air for more than five seconds, haha!

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3 comments on “Towing gliders
  1. Fbs says:

    Chuck is a genius on this one….

  2. Towing gliders is actually a lot of fun! I got a chance to get my tow endorsement at Chilhowee Gliderport (92A) in Benton, TN last year’s summer and got to tow there for six weeks during my vacation. It does have two very different phases: The first one is the ascend with the gilder in tow were you fly as consistent as possible and the other one is the descend where they say, do not shock cool the engine but get down as fast as you can. Their manual suggested slipping turns. I guess letting the Pawnee plummet out of the sky with about 4000ft/min and cruise power would be a great job for Chuck. But I am not sure how he would handle the first part…

  3. Ken Glaze says:

    Another good way to get a tow plane down at cruise power is to honk it into a 90 degree bank and pull an extra G. Works well for the Callair A-9s that I fly at my glider port. The Callair’s Vne is 20 mph slower than the Pawnee, so unless you slip or bank, the maximum descent of the Callair is a lot less than the Pawnee. Everyone should try their hand at being a tow pilot, there’s more “flying per minute” in that job than even aerobatics provides.

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