GlidePlan Experience

In my experience a good printed map is critical for establishing
situational awareness even in the GPS world. Over the years we have
all done pretty much the same thing when flying a new site. We bought
the sectionals, cut and pasted them together, manually put on the
various waypoints provided on Mr. Leibacher's amazing website, slapped
plastic over the whole thing and went flying. Oh wait, one for the
crew as well.

This was a laborious process especially for contest pilots. Along
comes the digital age with easy access to electronic versions of
aviation maps so I started experimenting with how to do this task
electronically first using fancy graphics software. Then I came across
software called GlidePlan which at first I was rather non pulsed
about. But I tried it as this software makes it easy to find the
electronic sectionals you need, import the waypoint file in SeeYou Cup
format right to the map, apply the styles you want for the various
points (say transparent red dots for turn points), adjust the point
label position and font size and print the whole works out on your
inkjet or take it to a someone with a big plotter. You can even scale
the map down which comes in handy on those MAT tasks in the west where
the sectional for the contest area is the size of a small tent.

Matt Herron, the developer, is considering offering customer sectional
chunks for specific contest areas which would be a plus. The interface
is still a little challenging but I used the software to prep for the
Region 9 contest and it worked well with the smaller WAC size map
earning some points on the MAT tasks. BTW I have no commercial
affiliation with GlidePlan its just useful software. John