Hike and Fly Days, Task Study Mode and SkyTrack Terrain

Walk, Fly, Repeat: Hike and Fly Days, Task Study Mode, SkyTrack Terrain and a Scoring Sandbox

Three weeks after the seven language manual went live, here is the next big website release. SkyTrackPro 3.6.0 brings a proper home for hike and fly days, puts the app's task study map on the web, adds a new terrain basemap, cleans up the glider catalog and the takeoff database, and gives competition scorers an isolated sandbox plus a conformance pass against the FAI rules. As always, every chapter of the manual was updated in all seven languages on the same day.

Hike and Fly Days: One Day, One File, Several Flights

Hike and fly is finally a first class citizen. A day recorded with the SkyTrackPro app arrives as one IGC file that holds the walks and every flight of the day, and the website now understands it as such. An IGC exported from the app and uploaded by hand carries the same marker, so the day stays intact either way. The site checks the app's day summary against the track itself and recomputes the distances when they drift, so what you see is what you flew.

• One logbook entry per day with a hike and fly badge and the number of flights. Duration and distance count the flights only, never the walk in between.
• The flight page paints the day: walked stretches in brown, flights in the usual climb colors, numbered takeoff and landing markers per flight, and a barogram that shades the walked sections.
• A day panel in the statistics sheet: flights, airborne time, longest flight, flight distance, hiked distance, hiking time, ascent and descent on foot, followed by one block per flight with its times, duration, distance, altitude and XC.
• Fair rankings: a hike and fly day enters the public flights and rankings with its best flight. XC distance and points come from that flight alone.
• Open to developers: the public API and the app REST carry the new hike and fly fields and flight counts, documented on the developers page.

Task Study Mode on the Web

The study map you know from the app now lives on the website, available from both the task view page and the task editor. Press Study and the map takes the whole stage. The optimized route becomes your editable baseline: drag a rim handle around any cylinder or sector, grab the line anywhere to drop a bend point on that leg, right click (or long press on touch) to undo it. The panel shows the optimized distance, the distance from SSS and the live study line side by side, with per leg labels on the map. Ground elevation reads from the terrain under your pointer, and the terrain profile follows whatever line you are currently drawing. Edits are ephemeral, exactly like in the app: study freely, leave, and the published task is untouched.

Task Editor: Route Check and Share Sync

Saving a task now warns when the route is incomplete or out of order (takeoff, SSS, turnpoints, ESS, then goal, with an elevated goal taking the place of the ESS). The share modal refreshes after every save, so the share text always carries the saved title, distances, windows, the versioned URL and the XCtrack code.

SkyTrack Terrain: A New Basemap

Meet SkyTrack Terrain, a hypsometric topo style in the spirit of classic XC maps: ochre valleys, dusty brown slopes, pale gray to white peaks, a soft hillshade, brown contour lines and muted forest fills, all rendered from our own elevation data. The tint fades as you zoom in so villages and roads stay readable. It is in the main style switcher and in both competition map switchers.

Glider Catalog: One Wing, One Entry

Pilots kept creating the same wing under a second spelling, because every form matched brand and model by exact text and proposals stayed hidden until approved. Both problems are gone.

• One resolver everywhere: the typeahead in your flight log, the admin search, the REST endpoints and the IGC analyzer all use the same matcher, which ignores case, accents, punctuation and Roman numerals, knows brand aliases and forgives typos (as long as the numbers match).
• Close matches before you create: the Propose a new glider form lists similar wings with a Use this button on each row, or Create anyway if yours is genuinely new.
• Pending proposals are searchable and clearly flagged, so the second pilot with the same new wing finds it instead of proposing it again.
• Developers get a new resolve endpoint and an optional confirm step when ensuring a model.

Takeoffs: Candidates That Earn Their Page

Hike and fly launches no longer create a public takeoff per meadow. An unknown launch spot is now recorded as a candidate with a placeholder name, kept off the map, the search and the counters. It becomes a real takeoff once three different pilots (or five flights on three days) fly from it, once a pilot names it from Edit Flight, or once an administrator promotes it from the new review queue, which also lets admins hide a spot or merge it into an existing takeoff. Launches within about 500 m of a known site keep matching that site, so nothing gets cluttered. Takeoff editors can now rename a takeoff directly from the edit form as well.

Live Tracking and Home Page

• Satellite pilots fly again: SPOT and Garmin devices report no height above ground, so a moving pilot could be drawn as a car. The live map now reads the terrain under every fix and calls the pilot airborne above 40 m, driving the wing, person and car markers, the list badge and the sorting.
• Home hero: satellite sessions show their source label, the panel link goes to All flights unless pilots are actually live, and free live slots are filled with the latest flights.

Light by Default, Your Device Decides

Cobalt Day, the light face, is now the standard theme and Cockpit, the dark face, the alternative. Without a stored choice the site follows your device's preference and keeps following live switches; once you pick a face with the header toggle, your choice wins permanently. Guests also get a single, clearer Sign in button in the header.

Under the Hood

• Every string translatable: the language phrase system now reaches the whole platform, including the admin area. The catalog grew from 2,288 to 4,067 phrases with no visible copy changes, which is the groundwork for the interface in more languages.
• Admin: user groups show their member count with a searchable members list, takeoffs get the candidate review queue, and brand and model saves block duplicates while keeping old spellings as aliases.
• Manual: flight page, uploading flights, flight log, rankings, takeoffs, troubleshooting and glossary chapters updated in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, and the mobile chapter drawer now works as it should.

Upload your next hike and fly day, open a task in Study mode and switch the basemap to SkyTrack Terrain. And if you score competitions. As always, let us know in the forum what you think and what you want next.

See you in the air.