Soaring Sandbox

Explore the Science of Soaring.

Interactive planning and teaching tools designed to help glider pilots, students, and instructors explore the ideas behind every flight.

Interactive tools for glider pilots

• Glider Range Rings

  Visualize wind- and terrain-aware glider range rings from airports at multiple altitudes with this free interactive soaring tool.

• Glider Polar Explorer

  Explore how speed, sink, lift, wind, ballast, flaps, and bank angle affect a glider polar and performance geometry.

• Thermal Simulator

  Explore how thermal size, airspeed, bank angle, centering, and variometer delay affect a glider circling in lift.

• Speed-To-Fly Race

  Race six best-glide, minimum-sink, lift-aware, and MacCready speed-to-fly strategies through an interactive course of thermals and sink.

• Glider Instrument Inspector

  Explore how glider pitot-static instruments, variometers, total-energy compensation, netto, and blocked inputs behave.

• Sounding Lab

  Select a recent balloon sounding on a map, explore its Skew-T chart, and release a surface parcel into the observed air column up to 20,000 ft.

• Glider Forces

  Explore how lift, drag, weight, pitch attitude, angle of attack, and net force affect a glider in an interactive side-view simulation.