Built

What changed,and what it is made of.

Paraguide ships most days. This page keeps the notes in plain words, names every source a read is built from, and says how a read is checked before a pilot sees it.

What changed

3 September 2026

Briefing and Debrief are the two halves of the app, and the navigation says so. The map lives inside the Briefing.
The Briefing opens to every pilot. Swiss launches carry the station history today; the read says which sources answered.
Annecy gets a full briefing: its launches, its airspace stated honestly, and the model that answered named on the read.
Parcel tops for every launch the ICON-CH2 grid covers.
Every climb a pilot sees is net, the number on the vario. The usable top of the day is read against the pilot, not the parcel.
The thermal engine has its first backtest against real flights, and the boundary-layer inputs are archived per launch and hour so every read can be re-run later.
Every read prints what it is built from. The spot card on the map does too.
A briefing is computed once per launch and day and shared for five minutes; the upstream calls behind it are shared for an hour.
The flight card is a postcard: the place on real imagery, the flight's line across it.

2 September 2026

The launch wind at each of your past flights comes from the weather station that was on the hill that hour. SwissMetNet history replaces the reanalysis grid.
A registry for club and network stations, so a hill's own station can be the memory for its launch wind.
Your history in the Briefing: the wind you launched in, the climb you found, the wind aloft, drawn as ranges with today's value against them.
The Briefing room settles: the map on top, the read beside the window, the charts unfolding under each sentence on a tap.
The logbook heatmap fills the desktop.

The notes start here. The logbook, the 3D replay, Wrapped, Gear, Ask and the iPhone beta were built before this page was.

What a read is built from

MeteoSwiss ICON-CH2
The forecast the day is read from: wind by height, thermals, cloudbase, the hours.
MeteoSwiss SwissMetNet
Station history for the wind on the hill at the hour of each launch you have made.
swisstopo
Terrain and aerial imagery for Swiss launches, the replay and the flight postcards.
Esri World Imagery
Aerial imagery outside Switzerland, under licence.
Your tracklogs
Every IGC you import: the climbs, the wind aloft, the launches, the wings, the sites. The read is yours because the archive is.
The library
Understanding the Sky, Thermal Flying, Cross Country Flying, Mastering Paragliding, The Art of Paragliding, and a flying school's published material. Cited in every answer that uses them.
Expert pilots
Pilots who fly for a living, credited by name where their knowledge is used.

How a read is checked

Thirty-eight evaluation suites run before a change ships: the envelope, the station archive, the day kinds, the climb module, the words a read may use.
The thermal engine is backtested against archived inputs and real flights. The first verdict is written up, and the archive grows every day.
Numbers are computed, never generated. Ask answers from the same numbers as the Briefing and cites its sources; a question it cannot ground is blocked before it reaches the engine.
Never a verdict. The Briefing describes the day and your history against it. The decision stays with the pilot, and the copy is written so that stays true.
Copy is checked against the product: a claim on this site has to be true in a pilot's hands today.