Flight analysis & coaching
Every paragliding and hang-gliding activity gets an automatic thermal analysis: the platform detects each thermal you worked, measures how well you flew it, and turns the numbers into a short coaching debrief. You'll find it on the activity page, above the Key Statistics.
The analysis runs on the server the moment your flight is processed — nothing to configure, and it works for uploaded IGC/GPX files as well as live-tracked flights.
The coaching panel
At the top of the panel:
- Flight quality — a 0–100 score combining five criteria (see How the quality score works below). 70+ is competition-level, 45–70 is good, below 45 means there's easy progress to make.
- Operational ceiling — the median altitude where your climbs topped out, with the p25–p75 band. Unlike your single highest point, this tells you where lift reliably stopped that day — useful for planning glides on similar days.
- Avg / Best climb — your average sustained climb across all thermals, and the best one.
Below, up to three coaching insights:
- ✔ ON POINT — something you did well, with the numbers to prove it ("Best climb: T#6 at 11:54:01 — 1028 m gain, 93% centring, 3.2 m/s sustained").
- ⚠ WORTH REVIEWING — the thermal that cost you the most, and what to try next time ("orbited 99 m from a 27 m core — try tighter turns when you feel the strongest lift").
The insights are recomputed from your data every time you open the page, in your language.
Can a flight have only positive insights?
Yes. Nothing forces a "worth reviewing" card. The critical insights only appear when there's actually something to flag — loose centring, a thermal you orbited, strong drift on a windy day, or a broken ceiling. On a clean flight where none of those trigger, the panel shows only your strong points. The reverse is guaranteed too: if a flight would otherwise show only criticism, the panel always keeps at least one positive card — a debrief that only scolds coaches badly.
How the quality score works
The Flight quality score is the sum of five criteria, 100 points in total. Each is capped at its own maximum — you can't bank extra credit in one area to hide a weakness in another. The references are calibrated on real flights, not theoretical ideals.
| Criterion | Max | What it rewards | How it's computed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flight time | 25 | Staying up | Your actual airborne time as a fraction of a 4 h reference. Only real flying counts — the walk-up of a hike-and-fly, or waiting on launch, is excluded. |
| Working the day | 25 | Linking climbs and using what the day offered | The number of thermals worked (up to 15 pts, reference 20 thermals) plus cumulative height gain (up to 10 pts, reference 5,000 m). |
| Climb efficiency | 25 | Strong, sustained climbs | Your average climb rate as a fraction of a 2 m/s reference. Average 2 m/s or more scores the maximum; 1 m/s scores half. |
| Centring | 15 | Circling in the core, not around it | Your median centring percentage — 90% centring is 13.5 points. |
| Consistency | 10 | Repeatable climbs | How steady your climb rates were across thermals, measured robustly (median absolute deviation over the median): working a few weak climbs alongside strong ones doesn't penalise you. |
A few consequences worth knowing:
- No thermals detected → score 0. A pure ridge-soaring or glide-only flight has nothing to score. That's expected, not a bug.
- A high score needs balance. Booming 5 m/s climbs still cap the climb sub-score at 25, so a competition-level total also needs flight time, exploitation, centring and consistency.
- The score now rewards the flight's performance too, not just how you turned: half the points (flight time + working the day) are about what you made of the day.
Why drift is no longer scored
"Drift management" scored your drift-to-climb ratio against an ideal of 0.3. In practice that ratio mostly measures the day's wind, not your flying: a weak thermal in wind drifts enormously per metre gained. Across our reference flights it scored 0 out of 10 everywhere — it informed nobody. Drift is still measured and shown for each thermal (its own column), but it no longer counts toward the score.
Where the numbers come from
Centring, climb rate, drift and the rest are measured per thermal (see the table below), then aggregated. The score is derived from your real GPS track and the estimated wind — there's no manual input and nothing to tune.
The per-thermal table
Each detected thermal (T#1, T#2, …) gets a row. Scroll the list — the fade at the bottom means there are more. The columns:
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| Time | Local time you entered the thermal. |
| Gain | Altitude gained from entry to exit. |
| Duration | Time spent in the climb. |
| Avg / Max climb | Your sustained (smoothed) climb rate — the honest number — and the best smoothed peak. |
| Circle radius | Average radius of your circles, derived from your ground track and the wind. |
| Bank | Estimated average bank angle in the turns. |
| Centring | How tightly your circles stayed around the thermal core (see below). |
Centring is the key coaching number. The analysis estimates where the strongest lift was (the core), compensates for wind drift, and compares the size of the core with how far your circles wandered from it. 80%+ is excellent (green), below 50% (orange) means you were orbiting the lift rather than climbing in it — usually fixed by tightening the turn exactly when the vario sings loudest.
Two buttons on each row:
- chart icon — highlights that thermal on the 2D map and the graph.
- 3D icon — opens the 3D player with the replay timeline positioned at the start of that thermal, so you can watch yourself work it.
The climb-rate heatmap
In the graph selector, pick Climb rate (free-flight activities only). Every GPS fix is drawn as a colored dot at its altitude:
- Green — strong climb (better than 3 m/s)
- Blue — climbing (0–3 m/s, brighter = stronger)
- Red — sink
Two reference modes:
- AMSL — altitude above sea level, with the terrain profile behind.
- AGL — height above the ground directly below you. This is the honest view of how much margin you actually had, and it makes inversion layers obvious as horizontal stripes of color.
Click any dot inside a climb to zoom the map and the graph to that thermal.
Reading a day's ceiling
Switch to the climb-rate heatmap in AMSL and look at where the green/blue dots stop appearing: if your climbs consistently die at the same altitude, that's your operational ceiling. When the coaching panel reports two distinct ceilings, an inversion probably broke during the day — climbs that pushed through kept going much higher.
INFO
The analysis needs actual circling to classify a climb as a thermal (at least one full turn and 15 seconds of sustained lift), so pure ridge soaring passes show on the heatmap but may not be listed as thermals.