Towing Systems

Assisted take off is any system for helping aircraft into the air (as opposed to strictly under its own power). more...

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The reason it might be needed is due to the aircraft's weight exceeding the normal maximum take off weight, insufficient power, or the available runway length may be insufficient, or a combination of all three factors. Assisted take off is also required for gliders, which do not have an engine and are unable to take off by themselves.

Catapults (CATO)

A well-known type of assisted take off is that using the aircraft catapult. In modern systems fitted on aircraft carriers, a piston, known as a shuttle, is propelled down a long cylinder under steam pressure. The aircraft is attached to the shuttle using a tow bar mounted to the nose landing gear (an older system used a steel cable called a catapult bridle; the forward ramps on older carrier bows were used to catch these cables), and is flung off the deck at about 15 knots above minimum flying speed, achieved by the catapult in a 4 second run.

The United States is replacing carrier steam catapults with linear induction motors. The system is called the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS). An electromagnetic wave travelling through the motor propels the armature along its length, pulling the plane with it. With this system, it will be possible to match launch power and aircraft weight more closely than with the steam system, causing less wear on the aircraft.

The catapult approach is also used for towing gliders into the air. This can be accomplished using an elastic bungee arrangement, or more commonly using a cable wound onto a winch, powered by a large diesel engine. The bungee approach is rarely used for man-carrying gliders, as the acceleration is uncontrolled and can yield very high G-forces. It is commonly used to launch model gliders however. Manned gliders are commonly launched simply by towing them aloft behind a powered aircraft.

JATO and RATO

JATO stands for 'Jet-assisted take off' (and the similar RATO for 'Rocket-assisted take off'). In the JATO and RATO systems, additional engines are mounted on the airframe which are used only during take off. After that the engines are usually jettisoned, or else they just add to the parasitic weight and drag of the aircraft. However some aircraft such as the Avro Shackleton MR.3 Phase 2 and Convair B-36 Peacemaker (which gained a quartet of jet engines in mid-life), had permanently attached JATO engines.

Such systems were popular during the 1950s, when heavy bombers started to require two or more miles of runways to take off fully laden. This was exacerbated by the relatively low powers available from jet engines at the time - for example the B-52 Stratofortress requires 8 turbojet engines to yield the required performance, and still required RATO for very heavy payloads ( a proposed update of the B-52 replaces these with half the number of much more powerful engines).

Read more at Wikipedia.org