Bringing gliding to the world and the living rooms of aviation enthusiasts

AUSTRALIA, August 12, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Gliding Australia is pleased to announce that competition live tracking will be centralised and available for future competitions around Australia. This will bring advanced live glider racing to Australia, and the world using the latest SkyMate tracking system.

The live tracking system has been used at the Skyrace GP competition for a number of years and has brought glider racing into the homes of glider pilots, friends, families, neighbours, and sports lovers around the world. During the competition, the trackers are placed in each competitor’s cockpit to send a signal and display the positioning to a website where anyone can sit back and enjoy the race, live. The trackers also supply the pilot live information about heading, location, and ranking for the race.

Nick Gilbert and Todd Sandercock created the trackers initially to engage with the friends and families of competition pilots.
Gilbert states “Racing gliders is intense and exciting and highly skilled, but to those on the ground, very underwhelming. The Skyrace concept made a family and friend accessible competition, and the SkyMate design came from that - how best to present a competition flight to non-glider pilots in a way that they will be most likely to understand what's going on. It also simplifies racing and makes turnpoint mistakes as unlikely as possible.”

Opportunities
The last Skyrace GP was watched in over 26 countries and had well over 1000 unique views. Viewing audiences included other glider pilots from Australia and around the world, but not only that, the friends and family of competing pilots were watching this on their living room TVs cheering competitors on, all in real-time.

New Generation Trackers
The latest generation (SkyMate V3) will be able to be used for all competition formats and current rules and is very reliable, the battery giving around 20 hours of flight time.

Benefits
The advantages are not just with the pilots and supporters. For those competition organisers, trackers simplify scoring, and saving the work of volunteers.
Gliding Australia has supported and partnered with this initiative, and initially 60 Trackers are available for competition use. The benefits are numerous:
Exposure to non-gliding demographic
Opportunities for sponsorship
Simplicity for Comp organisers
Used at wave camps, record attempts, and distance flights.

The trackers will be next used at the Queensland State Competition in September/October 2022, and thereafter at a number of national and state comps that follow this season.

About: Gliding Australia is the national sporting body for gliding in Australia from pre-solo through to international competitions. Gliding is a competitive air sport in which pilots fly unpowered aircraft competing for the fastest speed around a task.

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