Aerocart cargo gliders

This product is for towing behind another aircraft, but what about winch towing?

A winched glider implements flight with renewable electricity and it does so efficiently because the power and motor never leave the ground!

A glider can climb up to 5000 feet and travel 50x that before making a landing. Wouldn’t it be glorious to see cargo being autonomously slung from site to site across the world, powered entirely by green electricity?

"Despite the higher mass, takeoff & climb performance of the consist is similar to that of the lead plane flying independently.

This means the consist is capable of taking off on the same runways and with similar climb profiles as the primary tow plane is alone."

This is just denying basic physics. Ask any glider pilot how the climb out on aerotow varies based on the weight of the glider being towed.

What is their safety case?

How are they planning to handle aborted takeoffs of towing plane, for example?

How does it integrate with ATC? During towing? During landing of glider?

This video claims that trailer is landing separately and autonomously. Obscure of details. https://www.aerolane.com/news/florida-2025-q1-tests

Instead, can we implement autonomous formation flying? Each aircraft can still have its own engines and control, but can make a V shape allowing the following planes to run more efficiently.

Tow-plane pilot for gliders is a dangerous profession. A simple mistake by the glider pilot can kill the tow plane pilot, with not enough time to react. I saw this happen in person once (https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G...). Gliders and towing them is neither easy nor safe.

I use my cargo gliders only for full scale landing operations.

Reference on their page to the (obvious inspiration) Waco gliders of WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_CG-4

This concept raises more questions than the site answers:

* what's the point of landing in tow? The safety aspects and the failure modes are enormous

* it's unclear where the 65% fuel saving comes from. Riding the wingtip vortex on the inside produces downward momentum. In order to generate positive lift from the wingtip vortex, the follower has to be outside of it (e.g., gaggles of geese in wedge formation)

* taking advantage of wake flows, while possible (although 65% is highly improbable), would always be less efficient than optimizing a single airframe so that it minimizes the wake generation in the first place

* the site is missing footage of real flights. The 3 clips 10-seconds long are not showing what they claim to be showing. Also, does the "see flight tests" link work for anybody?

Really? Those who have had anything to do with gliders know there is plenty that can and will go wrong. Landing on-tow !?!? And what's the benefit - they might save a little in cruise, but they've got to get there (safely) first?

This sounds like a free lunch to me.

The iterated version where cargo can split off and land would maybe in some cases be interesting. A drone carrier.

air-train?

Pretty fascinating concept - take what we are already doing on the roads and translate it to the sky. Could lead to huge efficiency gains.