We all know what the manufacturer's polars look like, but what about our
individual planes. Has anyone done any work to develop a program that
would look at some flight logs and determine what a particular glider's
actual polar is? At one point Ball was making a vario system that would
determine the aircraft's polar over time just by flying.

For someone who already had some algorithms for computing wind from
ground track drift during thermals could take this info and then be able
to back figure from GPS ground speed what the IAS was during a
particular phase of the flight. By isolating longer sections of cruise
flight at varios airspeeds it should be do-able. Question is, has it
been done.

Mark

extra "hot" in the address to delay the spammers...