WeGlide Coach

The coach is new analysis feature that scans your flight and gives you data and tips, on what you should do differently. The coach is made up of three new features:

1. Speed to Fly Analysis (How fast should I fly between thermals?)
2. Weight Analysis (How heavy should I fly?)
3. Thermal Analysis (How tight should I circle?)

Speed To Fly Analysis

This feature is based on the concept of speed to fly theory. Speed to fly theory teaches us about the optimal speed to fly at any point in your flight. For any aircraft's polar, net air movement and expected climb of the next thermal, there exists an optimal speed to fly. It has two basic principles:

1. If thermals are very strong, it is worthwhile to fly faster between thermals. You'll arrive lower, but also earlier, and with a strong thermal, you can make up the altitude much more quickly.
2. If the air is rising, you should slow down to spend more time in the lift. If the air is sinking, you should speed up, to spend less time in the sink.

Based on this principles, we calculate the optimal speed you should be flying for every moment of your flight and compare it to how you were actually flying. In this way, we can offer you an indication if you should be flying slower or faster between thermals.

For small intervals of your flight (a few seconds), we calculate your True airspeed (TAS) using your ground speed and wind speed. Afterward, we calculate your IAS from the TAS. We adjust the polar of your aircraft using the weight you have entered and then evaluate it to calculate the net air movement for the small interval.

We calculate an expected climb (MacCready) value for every point in your flight. This is essentially the value of the next climb, but it also takes into account some more thermals from the past and future. Once we have the net air movement, and the expected climb value, we calculate how fast you should have been flying. So in the end, for each point in your flight, we know your actual speed and the optimal speed.

Coloring

In the above example, the pilot was flying a bit too slow between thermals. There are mutiple cases where it makes sense to fly a bit slower than speed to fly theory suggests. For example, if the cloud base is low, and you are very uncertain about the next thermal and want to minimize your risk of landing out. Therefore, the colored areas are defined as:

• Green: From 8 km/h too slow to 4 km/h too fast.
• Yellow: From 8 km/h too slow to 16 km/h too slow and from 4 km/h too fast to 8 km/h too fast
• Red: More than 16 km/h too slow or more than 8 km/h too fast.

Speed Areas

We calculate the speed to fly of your aircraft in net zero air for different MacCready values (0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0). These are the speed values shown on the left-hand side. To calculate the horizontal bar, we check how much time you spent in each area. Then, we calculate how much time you should have spent in each area - this is the vertical bar. If you were perfectly following speed-to-fly theory, the horizontal and vertical bars would always match.

Choose Your Interval

All the statistics we calculate can adjust exactly to the different intervals you want to analyze.

Different Contests

If you click on the sprint contest, you see the analysis of the fastest two hours of the flight.

Legs

You can also click on individual legs in the statistics section, which will then be analyzed. In this way, you can cycle through the legs and see exactly where you were flying too fast and where you were flying too slow.

Individual Glides

If you want to know the exact details of a single glide between two thermals, you can hover over it in the barogram. The statistics will adjust to only this single glide section. The length of the glide and the net air movement is displayed on the map.

This featuer is also very useful to compare different routes that people took. It works better than the glide ratio, as the glide ratio will increase if you slow down and also depends on the aircraft. The net air movement lets you compare who took the better line and at the same time tells you how good the weather was.

Weight Analysis

We know the net air movement of any point of your flight. With this information, we calculate how your flight would have turned out, if you were flying a bit heavier or lighter. We assume that, when flying heavier, you fly a bit faster, just so much to keep the same glide ratio. In thermals, your speed and radius will increase if you fly heavier, weakening the climb based on our internal thermal model. With this data, we run many simulations of your flight, search all possible weights and look for the one with which you would have been the fastest.

In this example, you can see that the pilot was flying almost with the optimal weight.

Coloring

The coloring schema is defined like the following:

• Green: Less than 2% difference to the optimal weight
• Yellow: Between 2% and 4% difference to the optimal weight
• Green: More than 4% differene to the optimal weight

Choose your Interval

Just as the Speed To Fly Analysis, this analysis also adjusts to different contests, legs and even individual glides. In this way, you can find out what weight would have been optimal for the sprint contest, the second leg of your big triangle, or some other interval.

Here you see that for the Sprint contest (the fastest two hours), the optimal weight is a lot more than for the Free contest (the entire flight) above.

Thermal Analysis

If you select a thermal in the barogram, it will be analysed in more detail. To do this, the thermal is divided into five equal height ranges. The average rise is shown for each of these areas. We ignore the first and last 15 seconds, where you are still centering the thermal or are already about to leave it.

In this example, the climb becomes significantly weaker in the upper fifth - the analysis recommends to leave thermals earlier.

Set Your Exact Weight

All of these analysis are only possible if we know the weight you were flying with. When analyzing flights, it is very important to know the exact weight. If you want to analyze the flight of someone else and guess the weight 50 kg wrong, the polar of the aircraft is very different. Therefore, the net air movement we would calculate would be wrong and we could not calculate the proper speed to fly.