Soaring

At this time no released version of FlightGear has any glider launching methods. Working winch launches and even multiplayer aerotows have however been successfully tested, the code is in CVS now (see Doing_aerotow_over_the_net) and will be included in the next release. If you cannot use CVS though, to go gliding you must start up in the air. For an example of how to do this see the related article called Starting in the Air, or see the start file for the Schweizer 2-33 (called sgs233-set.xml).

Thermals and sinks are modeled, but they must be defined individually in a thermal scenario file. To see how this is done it would be best to examine the file called data/AI/thermal_demo.xml, which sets up 11 thermals and 6 sinks around San Francisco Bay. To learn more about AI scenarios in general, see the related article called AI Systems. Note that the thermals and sinks exist independently of FlightGear's weather system, so it's possible to have cloud layers that don't match your thermal heights. To prevent this you may want to manually set the cloud layers to match your thermals. Thermal cap clouds are available since about one month after 0.9.10 was released. If you are using 0.9.10 or earlier you can make cap clouds work by a) fetching the cap cloud model from CVS, and b) adding a <z-m> offset to the cap cloud wrapper file to put the cloud at the right altitude.

A very nice piece of add-on scenery for gliding in the Menden (EDLA) area is available [1], including the required AI scenario file containing thermals for that area.

If you want to discover the austrian alpine region, you might want to read Pinzgauer Spaziergang.

If you log on to a multiplayer server while soaring, then your flight will be recorded at the FGTracker site, like this: [2], which makes flight review a snap.