20Live tracking

The live map#

/livetracking shows every pilot who is currently broadcasting, on one map, with a list beside it. It is public: anyone can watch, and no account is needed.

The selector at the top of the sidebar chooses what you are looking at: All Live Pilots, one of your buddy groups, or a competition task. The arrow handle on the edge of the map hides the list to give the map the whole screen, and the L key does the same. A small refresh icon sits next to the Updated stamp and pulls fresh positions right away.

Only tasks that are published and belong to today show up there. A task still in draft, or one from another day, is never listed and is never attached to a live flight.

A badge shows the state of the connection:

Next to the badge, Updated tells you when the last data actually arrived, which is the number to look at before concluding that a pilot has stopped moving.

Watching a pilot#

Each row in the list is a pilot, with their avatar, their name, a status badge and their key numbers. Two buttons sit on the row:

Selecting a pilot opens their detail card with everything the position carries: altitude and height above ground, instantaneous and average speed, vario, distance flown, takeoff time, the task they are on and their distance to goal.

The card keeps updating on its own while the pilot is selected, so you can leave it open and watch the numbers move. The vario is coloured: green in real lift, red in real sink, and neutral in the quiet band between -1.0 and +0.2 m/s, which is a wing's normal glide.

Task and distance to goal appear as soon as a pilot is flying a published task. If their tracker reports its own progress the site shows those figures; otherwise the server works them out from the task geometry and the incoming positions, so the numbers are there whatever the pilot flies with. Treat them as a live estimate for following a flight, not as a scoring result.

The Task tab#

When the map is showing a task, whether that is a competition view or a plain task link, the sidebar carries a Task tab next to Pilots. It is the briefing, on the map, so nobody has to open the task page in a second window to check a time.

The top line names the task, and under it sit the ruleset, the competition day, the optimized distance and the number of legs.

Times lists Takeoff Open, Start Time, Window Close and Deadline, each exactly as it was set in the task editor. A window left empty is simply not listed. Where a task uses several start gates, they follow as chips under the times.

The next window still to come is highlighted and counts down, and everything already gone is marked passed. These are always local task times, never converted to your own timezone, and the zone is spelled out under the list. The countdown only runs on the task's own day, so an old task link shows the times without a misleading clock.

Waypoints lists the route in order: the kind badge, the name, the cylinder radius (or the length of the goal line) and the optimized distance out to the next one. The counter on the right is the live part: how many of the pilots currently on task have already tagged that waypoint. A waypoint everybody is past turns green.

Following pilots and buddy groups#

The Live Tracking tab on your dashboard is where the social side is managed: who you follow, who follows you, your buddy groups and your pending invites.

A buddy group is a named set of pilots that appears as one entry in the live map selector. It is what a club, a holiday group or a competition training camp uses to watch each other without wading through every pilot in the world.

1. Press Create Group and give it a name and description.
2. Choose whether it is Public, so other pilots can find and join it, or Private.
3. Invite pilots by searching for them by name, or copy the Private invite link and send it.
4. Invited pilots see the invite on their own Live Tracking tab and can Accept or Reject it.
5. Manage members later with Manage members, and remove anyone with Remove member.

Regenerate link issues a new private link and kills the old one, which is how you close a group that has been shared too widely.

A buddy group also unlocks the day analyzer, which rebuilds a whole day of the group's flying from the live archive. See Analyzing a day.

Competition live tracking#

A competition with live tracking enabled has its own live view. It uses the same map, but the pilot list is filtered to the confirmed participants of that competition and the sidebar carries the competition identity.

The link is stable for the whole event: /livetracking/comp-<id>/<slug> always resolves to the competition's current published task of the day. Organizers can print it on a briefing sheet on day one and it still works on the last day.

Live ops#

Competition staff with live operations rights see an extra panel: the live ops feed. Pilots send status messages from the app, and they arrive here.

Staff can Acknowledge a message, so the rest of the team can see it has been picked up and by whom. For a retrieve, Assign driver attaches one of the event's drivers to the pilot, Change reassigns, and Mark picked up closes it.

Organizers can also stop the task from here, which is shown to everyone as Task stopped.

External trackers and the API key#

Satellite trackers can feed the live map alongside the app, which matters in terrain with no mobile coverage. Two providers are supported.

Each device can be tested, edited, switched on and off, or removed. Positions from a connected tracker show up on the live map with a small badge marking the source.

The same tab holds your personal API key, used by external tools that push or read live data on your behalf. Create API key issues one, Generate new key rotates it, Revoke key kills it. The panel shows when it was created, when it was last used and how many calls it has made.