In gliding circles launch failures are regularly practiced and are used as part of currency checking/evaluating preparedeness for first solo. One of the options on practice aerotow launch failure will be to engineer a situation that'll require either a turn towards a landing area somewhere on the airfield or a landing on the recipricol of the takeoff direction. I think (might have changed) that in the USA part of the standard FAA (Gliding) test is a launch failure which requires a 180 back to land.