The Me 163 owned by the Aust War Memorial has a Tost hook fitted to the underside of the fuselage.
The Komet 163 was a rocket powered glider, once it's rocket burnt out it glid back to earth.
http://www.flightjournal.com/fj/articles/me163/me163_1.asp
Kevin Raner
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jason Armistead" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2003 11:27 PM Subject: [aus-soaring] Rocket launching of gliders ? Anyone know if it's been done before ?
> An unusual historical question for the combined genius of the list ... > > While visiting Ray Ash at Gulgong on Saturday (to scan some great old > photos of the early days of Southern Cross Gliding Club for our Back To > Camden Week starting 20th September), we were looking through Ray's early > log book. > > It's a British Gliding Association one, marked as 3rd Reprint 1949. > > On the inside front cover, it lists the Types of Launch as: > > C = Catapult > W = Winch > M = Motor car-tow > A = Aero-tow > > and > > R = Rocket assisted >
My first 3 log books are BGA ones dating from the mid-60s - though I was already flying in Australia (at Wagga Wagga) when I started Book no 3. All these things were still in the books as late as 1970.
C = catapult is certainly the way to record a Bungy launch - they were regularly being done often enough at the Long Mynd when I started flying in the UK. I am assured by early pioneers that they did do some rocket launches of T-21s and the like in the late 1940s - with strap-on rockets that took you to 2- 3000 ft in about 45 sec and required a take-off technique very similar to the modern high-powered winches but without the cable - I am sure people like Derek Piggott have more information and he writes regularly for Soaring Magazine ( http://www.soaringmagazine.com ). The trick would have been to (1) light the blue touch paper and retire immediately; (2) make sure the wing runner remembers to let go (3) adopt a steep climb attitude before the speed exceeds a sensible climb speed lie around 55 kt for the T-21 and (4) be ready for the rocket to run out of fuel so you can lower the nose at the top of the launch.
True, the idea of the rocket launch was inspired by Hanna Reitsch and her test flying of the Me-163 Komet (though I doubt it was a Tost hook on it) - the Shuttle crews are nowadays effectively flying a rocket-launched glider! (It carries a US Experimental registration!) though several Komets exploded on landing as the hydrazine fuel was highly explosive. I can recall some historical items in Flight magazine from the early 60s, reminiscing about the good old days, that spoke of rocket launches in the test flying situation, but realistically it was all a bit of a pipe-dream. Still, they would have considered 55:1 self-launchers in the same category then!!
And the Caproni jet was already in service by 1973 - a good device for converting fuel into noise if ever I saw one!! At least the launch was (sort of) controllable with that system!! And I can remember people who kited winch launches to get up to over 5000 ft before releasing, as well as hearing of (but never actually seeing) people do vertical circuits where the heading never changed more than 30 degrees from start of winch launch to landing. We still occasionally get days in the Cooma area when the heading arrow of the GPS points towards the tail of the glider due to wind speed exceeding minimum steady glide airspeed.
Wombat
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