Winning strategies

Measured in percent · lower is better

Time that goes into neither a climb nor progress down the course. This is the time spent to find lift, to stay up, and to decide what to do next. The value is the share of the speed-section time, from the start to ESS or to the landing, in which the pilot neither climbed in a thermal nor glided with real net speed. A lower value means less time lost between climbs.

Measured in kilometres · higher is better

How far the pilot gets down the course before they must stop and circle again. This is the direct reading of how often they stop. The value is the scored flown distance divided by the number of thermals taken after the start, so 3 km means three kilometres of course for each climb. The pilot must fly 20 km or more. The note of each pilot adds their mean climb percentile inside shared thermals, so you can read the number of stops together with the climb strength. Long legs between weak climbs is a different day from long legs between strong ones. We leave out a pilot whose instrument records a position only every 5 seconds or less often. A track that coarse cannot show this detail, and the pilot would seem to fly differently when they do not.

Measured in percent · no expected direction

How much further the pilot flew on glide than the optimised course line needed. 0% is a flight exactly along the line, and 12% is a glide 12% further than necessary. On each completed speed-section leg, we compare the pilot's route with the optimised distance of the leg, weighted by that optimised distance. Only the glides are measured at their full path length. Circling and searching contribute their entry-to-exit displacement instead. A climb or a search for lift therefore never reads as a wide line, because a pilot chooses a line only on glide. 0% is a real value that a pilot can reach: a pilot who flies the line of the optimiser scores exactly zero. There is no expected direction, and this metric changes sides with the day: on a day when most of the field completes the course, flying wide costs you, but on a day when most of it lands out, the pilots who leave the line to hunt for lift are the ones still in the air. Read the sign of the correlation against how many pilots made goal.

Measured in seconds · lower is better

Every second between the opening of the gate and the crossing of the start line is a second lost for nothing. The value is the seconds from the start gate taken to the scored SSS crossing. On an elapsed-time task, the pilot’s own crossing is the reference, so the delay is 0 by definition. The start table adds the crossing altitude, and the distance behind the leading pilot who had already started.