Ramblings

Disclaimer: I am only a paragliding hobbyist, not an aeronautical engineer nor a private or commercial pilot. No guarantee that the following is accurate. I stumbled upon magnetic compass errors in my HAGAR exam, mandatory to obtain a P3 rating and above from HPAC . The nerd in me really wanted to understand the source of these errors, especially after reading conflicting explanations from different sources and having long arguments with my mechanical engineer friends, so I had to dig deeper. This was purely out of curiosity since magnetic compasses have long been reduced to the role of calibrating gyro compasses , which do not suffer from the errors below but from divergence and need to be reset periodically from straight and level flight. And I believe the latter are themselves only used as a fallback for GPS / electronic compasses. Background Magnetic dip First you have to understand that as you leave the equator towards the magnetic poles, the force from Earth's magnetic field

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Here is what I have on my XCTrack flight instrument and why. You can download the config file here , move it to /XCTrack/Config on your device then import it in XCTrack (Preferences -> Testing & Debug ->  Import configuration). The items in  bold  below are those that I find essential. Everything else is optional or useless.  Thermalling Thermal Mode GPS Altitude : The most useful metric for XC in my opinion. I use it to gauge whether I am high enough for crossing valleys / gaps in the terrain. Thermal Gain : Despite the vario beeps, in broken lift it can be hard to tell how the lifty and sinky parts of your turns (or figure 8s when close to terrain / in a lift band) average out. I keep glancing at this number every 30s to gauge whether the lift is so broken that I'm barely maintaining or even slowly sinking out. This is easy to do with just altitude, but not having to remember what height I entered a thermal and to do mental math is a little bit of brain power I can foc