Cross-country flight: planning and navigation

How cross-country flying differs from soaring by the slope

At the slope you work in familiar air. The field is below you, the lift is known, and a mistake costs you one approach. A route works differently: you leave the known behind and buy information with height. Each next valley opens up only once you are already in it.

Three differences, from which everything else grows.

• Decisions are irreversible. Once you have gone over the ridge, you will not come back upwind. At the slope any decision is cancelled by a 180-degree turn.
• The planning horizon is longer. At the slope you think one turn ahead. On a route you think about the glide, the next climb and the field below it. That is three levels at once.
• A mistake costs not a flight but a day. Land 40 kilometres from launch and you have lost the car, the time, and sometimes the evening of the driver who is looking for you.

From which it follows: a route is not “a long flight at the slope”. It is a different discipline, and you prepare for it separately. The international CIVL SafePro Para standard puts cross-country flying in a separate stage 5B and requires at least five cross-country flights — and flights along one and the same ridge do not count.

Preparing the route the evening before

A route is won in the evening, not at launch. In the morning you will have no time to study the map, charge the instruments or arrange a car. Break the preparation into five steps and do them in the same order every time — then you will not forget anything.

Step 1. The forecast. Look at three things: the height of the base, the strength and direction of the wind at altitude, and the start and end times of thermal activity. If the wind at 3,000 metres is stronger than 30 km/h, you will not fly a route against it — plan the line downwind.

Step 2. The line. Draw the route on the map and break it into 10–15 kilometre sections. Each section should have a source of lift at its start and a landing field at its end.

Step 3. Airspace. Check the boundaries of the area, the ceiling and the latest NOTAMs. The basic air-law module covered how the UGA areas are built, the Gudauri ceiling and the five-kilometre rule for the state border — before a route those are not theory but working constraints on your line.

Step 4. Instruments and radio. Charge your phone, your instrument and your tracker. Update the airspace file. Check that track logging starts automatically.

Step 5. People. Tell one specific person: where you are going, until what hour, and what to do if you have not made contact. Not “the group chat” — a person, with a name and a phone number.

Reading the terrain and choosing the line

The line of a route is a chain of places where the air goes up, joined by glides. The pilot’s job is to choose the chain so that there is as little emptiness as possible between the links.

Where the terrain makes thermals. Look for four signs.

• A sunlit slope. In the morning the east faces work, in the middle of the day the south faces, in the evening the west. In the mountains this rule shifts the working time of each slope by hours.
• A change of surface. The boundary between forest and meadow, scree among grass, a rock outcrop, the roof of a village. A thermal is born at a boundary, not in the middle of a uniform field.
• Protruding noses and spurs. The ribs of a ridge gather the wind and release bubbles more regularly than a flat wall does.
• The mouths of side valleys. Warmed air from the valley rises along its axis and releases at the exit.

How to join them up. The ideal line runs along the windward side of a sunlit ridge at a constant distance from the crest. It does not straighten corners through shade and does not cut across a glacial cirque. A two-kilometre detour along working terrain is almost always cheaper than a straight line through dead air.

Cross Country Magazine puts the main rule of cross-country flying briefly: never leave a climb. It only makes sense to leave lift when you know where you are going and the climb there is already weakening.

Landing fields: how to find them in advance

Landing fields are found at home, on the satellite map, not in the air at 300 metres. In the air you only choose from what you already know.

What you do the evening before. Open a satellite image along the line of the route and mark points every 5–10 kilometres. For each one write down three numbers: the coordinates, the elevation above sea level and the approximate size. Load the points into your instrument as waypoints with names you will understand: “PL-01 field by Pasanauri”, “PL-02 meadow below the bridge”.

What to look at on the image.

• Size and shape. At least 100 by 100 metres for a confident approach. In the mountains, with a margin, because there is often only one side you can approach from.
• Slope. Look at the shadows and at the pattern of the roads. It is always better to land uphill, so the slope also tells you which way to approach.
• Power lines. Look for cleared strips, poles, straight lines of trees along a road. The wire itself is not visible on the image; its corridor is.
• Access. Is there a road a car can reach you by. A field with no road turns a 40-minute retrieve into four hours.
• What is growing. A mown meadow is good. Head-high maize, a vineyard, a greenhouse are bad, even if the size is right.

Along the Georgian Military Road the situation is kind to a pilot: the Aragvi valley is narrow, but the road runs along it without a break, and almost every field turns out to be within a couple of kilometres of tarmac. That is a rare luxury — in most mountain areas access has to be planned separately.