How GAP Scoring Works

GAP is the scoring system used by most paragliding (PG) and hang gliding (HG) cross-country competitions in the world. It is maintained by FAI/CIVL, the international body for free-flight sports, and fully defined in Section 7F of the FAI Sporting Code.

The name comes from the three people who designed it in the early 2000s: Gerolf Heinrichs, Angelo Crapanzano and Paul Mollison. CIVL has refined it many times since.

The core idea: a perfect task is worth 1000 points. GAP splits those points into four categories (distance, time, leading and arrival), and each pilot earns a share of each depending on how they did against the rest of the field. A day that falls short of ideal, because few pilots launched or nobody got far, is worth less than 1000.

If you've never flown a competition task, here's how one is put together.

The task committee sets a route as a series of turnpoints. Each is a GPS position with a cylinder around it, and pilots must fly into each cylinder in order. A typical task has these parts:

• Launch: where pilots take off. You must launch to get a score.
• Start of Speed Section (SSS): where your timed run begins. In a race, your clock starts at a fixed start gate time: the last gate at or before you crossed. In a time trial (also called elapsed time), it starts when you cross the cylinder.
• Turnpoints: the waypoints in between, tagged in order by flying into their cylinders. Radii are usually 400 m to 2 km.
• End of Speed Section (ESS): the finish line for timing, where your clock stops. It is often the last turnpoint before goal.
• Goal: the final turnpoint. Reach it and you've completed the task. In PG you must reach goal to get any time points; ESS alone isn't enough. A task can also set an elevated goal, which is the ESS as well.

A turnpoint can also have altitude limits ( §6.2.1 ). A crossing then counts only if your altitude is within them, give or take 5 m ( §9.2.1 ); the report card tells you when one didn't count. Goal can't have altitude limits.

Your speed section time runs from crossing SSS to reaching ESS. Your flown distance is measured along the optimised route, through the turnpoints you reached.

Not every day deserves the full 1000 points. If conditions were poor and most pilots landed near launch, the day should count for less in the competition. GAP handles this with task validity: a multiplier between 0 and 1 that scales the points on offer.

Task validity is the product of three separate validities:

Overall task validity is:

$\text{Task Validity} = \text{Launch Validity} \times \text{Distance Validity} \times \text{Time Validity}$

and the points available for the task are:

$\text{Available Points} = 1000 \times \text{Task Validity}$

On a good day, task validity is close to 1.0 and the task offers nearly 1000 points. On a poor day it might offer only 200 to 400.

GAP splits the available points four ways. The split depends on the fraction of pilots who made goal, called the goal ratio.

• Distance Points reward how far you flew. They are always the largest share.
• Time Points reward how fast you flew the speed section. They are worth more when many pilots make goal.
• Leading Points (also called "departure points") reward pilots who flew at the front and showed the way. On by default; a competition can turn them off.
• Arrival Points reward reaching ESS early. Hang gliding only. On by default for HG; a competition can turn them off.

When nobody makes goal, most of the points go to distance. As the goal ratio rises, more go to time and leading: if everyone finished, the question is who was fastest, not who flew furthest.

A polynomial sets the distance weight from the goal ratio. With nobody in goal, distance takes 90% of the points; with half the field in goal, about 42%.

One exception: in hang gliding, if nobody reaches the end of the speed section, the task has no time or arrival points at all. Distance and leading keep their usual shares, and the rest simply isn't awarded. No pilot's score changes, since nobody could have earned either without crossing ESS, but the scoreboard and report card then show what was really on offer. The report card says so in its day-quality section and beside the time and arrival components.

That caps such a day. With nobody in goal, the distance weight is 0.9 and the leading weight is 0.0175, so even a perfect day offers at most 900 points for distance and 18 for leading, 918 in total.

Every pilot who launches earns distance points, which is why they make up most of a typical score. In paragliding, they are simply proportional to the distance you flew:

$\text{Distance Points} = \dfrac{\text{Your Distance}}{\text{Best Distance}} \times \text{Available Distance Points}$

The pilot who flew furthest gets all the distance points, and everyone else gets a share in proportion. In hang gliding, only half the points work this way; the other half come from a "difficulty" measure, described below.

Time points reward pilots who fly the speed section quickly. Who can earn them:

• Paragliding: you must make goal ( §13.2 ). This removes any reason for a fast final glide low to the ground.
• Hang gliding: you must reach ESS, and goal then validates your time. By default, a pilot who crosses ESS but lands short of goal keeps only 80% of their time and arrival points ( §13.2 ). Each competition can change this under Advanced scoring settings. It doesn't affect distance or leading points.

If you qualify, your time points depend on your speed fraction, a number between 0 and 1 for how close you came to the fastest time:

$\text{SF} = \max\!\left(0,\; 1 - \left(\dfrac{\Delta t}{\sqrt{t_{\text{best}}}}\right)^{5/6} \right)$

Here $\Delta t$ is how much slower you were than the best time, and $t_{\text{best}}$ is the best time, both in hours. The 5/6 exponent is fixed by the 2026 specification for both sports.

The best time ( §9.4.1 ) is the fastest time of any pilot in goal for paragliding, and the fastest time of any pilot to reach ESS for hang gliding, whether or not they then made goal.

The curve is forgiving. Pilots close to the fastest time get nearly full points, and the drop-off is gradual, so finishing 10 minutes behind the winner still earns a large share.

$\text{Time Points} = \text{SF} \times \text{Available Time Points}$

In a race with start gates, your clock runs from the start gate you took ( §9.2.4.1 ): the last gate at or before your start-cylinder crossing, not the crossing itself. If the gates are at 13:30 and 13:50 and you cross at 13:49, your clock starts at 13:30.

A time trial uses your actual crossing time. Either way, the report card shows the gate you took and when you crossed.

Leading points, also called "departure points", reward pilots who take the risk of flying at the front of the gaggle and showing the way to goal. Without them, the best tactic would be to hang back in thermals and let others find the way.

Leading points are on by default for both sports, as in the FAI formula, and a competition can turn them off. Paragliding gives leading more weight than hang gliding, because it has no arrival points competing for the non-distance share.

Hang gliding only. Arrival points reward the order in which pilots reach ESS. The first to arrive gets the most, and each later pilot gets less.

Except Class 2. A hang gliding class flying FAI Class 2 (rigid wings with movable aerodynamic surfaces) gets no arrival points: its arrival weight is 0, and that share goes to time ( §11 ). The organiser marks which classes fly Class 2 in the competition's scoring settings.

The order comes from the clock at ESS, not from speed. Pilots are ranked by the time of day they crossed the end of the speed section. So a pilot on an earlier start gate can arrive ahead of a faster pilot on a later gate and earn more arrival points. That surprises people, but it's intended: arrival points reward getting there first, which is what makes racing at the front worth the risk. Time points already reward speed.

The first pilot to arrive gets 100% of the available arrival points, and everyone who reaches ESS gets at least about 20% (the constant term in the curve below). In between, the curve falls quickly at first: arriving ahead of half the field is worth about 33%, not 50%.

Here ArrivalRatio is the fraction of the pilots reaching ESS that you arrived ahead of:

$\text{ArrivalRatio} = 1 - \frac{\text{PositionAtESS} - 1}{\text{PilotsAtESS}}$

$\text{ArrivalFactor} = 0.2 + 0.037\,r + 0.13\,r^2 + 0.633\,r^3$

The four coefficients add up to exactly 1, so the first arrival gets the full points. Each pilot's report card shows their position, ESS time and the arithmetic, and the ESS column of the task's scores table shows the arrival order for the whole field.

Arrival points are on by default for hang gliding, and a competition can turn them off. They never apply to paragliding.

Your task score is the sum of your four components, rounded to one decimal place ( S7F §12 ). Penalties are subtracted before rounding ( §13.5 ), so rounding is always the last step:

$\text{Total} = \text{round}_{0.1}\!\left(\text{Distance} + \text{Time} + \text{Leading} + \text{Arrival} - \text{Penalties}\right)$

A score never goes below zero, however large the penalty. Pilots are ranked by total, highest first, and a tie goes to the pilot who flew further. The scoreboard shows whole points, but ranking and tie-breaks use the one-decimal value.

GlideComp implements the core GAP formulas of the 2026 edition of the CIVL Sporting Code Section 7F, and scores every task with them, including historical competitions flown under earlier rules (those pages carry a notice that their scores are indicative). We check its results against real competition scores published by AirScore. The validity polynomials, weight split and points formulas follow the official specification. GlideComp doesn't implement every feature of the specification, and in a few places it deliberately, or for now, behaves differently; the next section lists every difference.

The tables below group features by FAI competition category. Section 7F is written for Category 1 events, the FAI World and Continental championships. Organisers of Category 2 and non-sanctioned events, which includes most local and club competitions, may score however they like ( S7F §1.1 ). GlideComp has everything a Category 2 or local competition needs; all it lacks are the Category 1 championship sub-rankings.

All competition categories

FAI Category 1 (World & Continental championships) only

These sub-rankings only appear at FAI Category 1 championships, which have national team entries and a separate women's category. GlideComp deliberately leaves them out: Category 2 and local competitions don't use them, they're defined in Sporting Code Section 7A §5.2.4–5.2.5, and they don't change anyone's score, since each is just a filtered list of the same task scores.

A new competition starts with the official CIVL GAP settings for its sport: leading points on for both, and arrival points and distance difficulty on for hang gliding, so its scores match a standard FAI/AirScore event. See Default Competition Settings for the full list. You can change any of them under the competition's Advanced scoring settings.

The scoring engine is open source on GitHub. Every change to how a flight is scored is written up in the scoring changelog, with what moved and who it affects. A change rescores every competition, including ones that have already finished.

• CIVL Sporting Code Section 7F — XC Scoring (2026 Edition)
  The definitive specification, with every formula, coefficient and rule, including penalties, stopped tasks and series scoring.
• FAI/CIVL — International Hang Gliding and Paragliding Commission
  The governing body that maintains the GAP rules and runs the World and Continental championships.
• FAI Sporting Code
  The full set of FAI sporting codes for all air sports. Section 7 covers hang gliding and paragliding.