alt Hacker NewsDo you mean laying out 50 mile long cables from place to place with big engines on the ground that pull in a cable at a couple hundred miles per hour after a plane attaches to it? That wouldn't work. Not even if you skipped tow out a cable from your departure point so it could be reused.
And if you had a track for the cable to run in or a carriage holding the winch to drive travel along, then you would just make it rail freight.
No. Winch glider launches (which are not a new thing) use a ground-based winch to give the glider an initial impulse, and the glider uses that to gain altitude and then glide for a much longer distance.
https://glidingschool.com/briefing-winch-launch/