Competition flying produces some of the most interesting flights to analyse. Vulture pulls them straight from Soaring Spot, with the replay, thermals, and performance data waiting on your iPhone or iPad.
Browse competitions in the app
Open the sidebar and tap Open Soaring Spot to launch the competition browser.
The title at the top is a menu with two entries: Competitions and Recently opened. Competitions shows all available contests, and the filter button at the bottom narrows them by country and year. Anything you've opened before turns up under Recently opened, so a contest you're following through the week is two taps away.
Tap a competition to see its flying days as tiles, grouped per class, with cancelled days struck through. Pick a day and you get the scoreboard: place, pilot with their country flag, and underneath in smaller type the contest ID, glider and start and finish times, with the score on the right. The top three places are tinted gold, silver and bronze, so the best flights stand out while you scroll.
Tap Select, tick the flights you want, and the button at the bottom opens them together. There's a select-all button next to it when you want the whole day, and a task button on the right to look at the task first. The competition task is fetched alongside the results and applied to everything you open, so the route is on the map without any manual setup.
Use the browser extension
If you're browsing results on soaringspot.com, the Vulture browser extension makes it even easier. Available for Safari and Chrome, it adds Open in Vulture links directly into Soaring Spot result pages.
The extension works on daily results, total scores, and task pages. Tap the link and the flight opens in Vulture, without going through the app first.
What happens after you download
Once a flight is downloaded, it appears in your flight list with the competition task already applied, including observation zones and waypoints. From there you can:
- Replay the flight on the map
- Analyse thermals, phases, and glide performance
- Compare with other pilots from the same competition day
Because every flight from the same day shares the exact same task, the numbers line up, making it easy to see where the winning pilots gained their time.
Happy analysing, and blue skies!
