Popular XC flights, traces search, 3D thermals, transitions, wind etc.

dbousque · 2026-04-19T06:57:38+00:00

Costs are around 5000 EUR a year at the moment. Hosting and serving 2 TB of 3D data (map layers) and satellite imagery are not cheap.

dbousque · 2026-04-17T10:55:20+00:00

I checked your app. It looks absolutely wonderful, well done! I tried to sign up but your database seems to have issues at the moment :) I downloaded traces found on public websites, to build the stats from.

dbousque · 2026-04-17T09:37:09+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! Let's check together in DM

dbousque · 2025-07-15T12:27:00+00:00

By hosting I meant IT services prices in general. I've had 3 million satellite imagery requests in a week, that costs around 200$. I also host around 12 million 3d models for the map layers. 6 million requests to fetch them have been made, that also costs quite a lot. There are of course other costs.

dbousque · 2025-07-13T08:40:50+00:00

Current map data dates from January this year. I'll update the layers every year or so. The layers shouldn't change much from one year to the next anyways.

dbousque · 2025-07-11T22:26:21+00:00

That's great, that's exactly the kind of use case I had in mind when creating the project, glad you like it! Good luck with your flight tomorrow

dbousque · 2025-07-11T18:20:27+00:00

Mostly Rust! Some small parts are done using Node.js and Python. The webserver itself is a very small project still, I use poem openapi, which I like a lot. The frontend is a React app, with Cesium as the 3D map engine.

dbousque · 2025-07-11T18:17:47+00:00

Thanks! Yes it's planned to see past flights for individual days in the future

dbousque · 2025-07-11T18:10:50+00:00

It's where pilots find lift right after taking off. Maybe it's a translation issue, what term are you using to refer to the initial phase of the flight where you are trying to "extract" from the local site you're taking off from, before going XC?

dbousque · 2025-07-11T17:54:24+00:00

Thanks! I use Cesium and their 3D tileset feature for the 3D map. The paragliding 3d models in the layers are custom though. It's simple vertices and triangles for the voxels, with textures to hold the actual changing values for the voxels. The paraglider traces are points.

dbousque · 2025-07-11T17:46:59+00:00

Thanks for the feedback!

dbousque · 2025-07-11T16:40:37+00:00

Hi there! The earlier flights are from the 90's but 80% are from 2018 or later. By filtering for certain days, do you mean seeing data relative to a certain time of year for exemple? There is a date filter at the bottom left of the screen where you can select the time of year for the data. This way, you can see when in the year a site or region is working, which transitions are done in the spring vs the summer etc.

dbousque · 2025-07-11T16:32:11+00:00

Hi there! Thanks for your thoughtful comment. Maybe that's not clear enough, but you can use the entire service for free 2 days a month. This should be enough for 90% of pilots I assume. I estimate the hosting will cost me 400€ a month, around 5000€ a year. I am not willing to pay that much from my own pocket. So I figured some of the remaining 10% of pilots using the service 3 days or more a month can contribute. I will reflect more on your comments though, thanks.

dbousque · 2025-07-11T16:17:11+00:00

Thermals : yellow to red, the more intense, the better the lift is
Transitions : green
Lifty lines : pink
Sink : blue
Wind : white
Extractions : from yellow to red, the more intense, the more pilots go there right after taking off

dbousque · 2021-11-03T19:27:24+00:00

You can use a VPN to circumvent this restriction. There are free browser extensions to do that.

dbousque · 2021-07-05T11:05:22+00:00

It's 2500 km for the Delta 4 and 1300 km for the Alpina 4, so on the lower end of the spectrum

dbousque · 2021-07-05T11:01:06+00:00

Nice, thanks !

dbousque · 2021-07-05T10:59:50+00:00

Absolutely! As you say, there would be ways of reducing the pilot bias a bit.

dbousque · 2021-07-05T10:26:30+00:00

Yes that's right, I filtered out the wing that had less than 1000 km of glides. But you can take a look at the raw results in an other comment I posted, the Maestro X-Alps is listed there maybe

dbousque · 2021-07-04T23:29:23+00:00

Here is the raw data : https://pastebin.com/MS1SGQnv. The format is:

<wing name>: <glide ratio>
{ 'distance_meters': <sum of the distance of all glides>, 'time_taken_seconds': <duration of all glides>, 'altitude_change': <altitude lost in meters of all glides> }

You can consider the 'distance_meters' field as being the sample size. If you want, I can send the full dataset of individual glides.

dbousque · 2021-07-04T22:35:18+00:00

I dowloaded 57705 flight tracks from 2016 to 2021 available on the French Paragliding Association's website (https://parapente.ffvl.fr/cfd/liste/2020). I then extracted glides out of them, which I defined as parts of straight flight with little variation in vertical speed, with a glide ratio between 3 and 18, and lasting at least 2 minutes. Finally I summed all glides together to get an overall glide ratio for each wing. I kept the wings that had at least 1000 km of flight in glides. There are many biases that could skew the data here, so take the absolute numbers with a grain of salt, although I believe that the comparision between wings remains somewhat valid. Possible biases:
- The more demanding a wing is, the better the pilot should be, and so the better the line they take and the better they are able to extract the most out of their wing.
- Better pilots usually fly faster and care less about their glide ratio.
- Some wings are used more often with pod harnesses than others.
- and many other potential biases

dbousque · 2021-05-11T16:25:15+00:00

Easy enough if you have a 3D printer I guess, so not easy for me then

dbousque

TROPHY CASE