Have you ever had a flight that was very special, and yet when you downloaded from your GPS and reviewed it, felt completely dismayed? I recently had that experience when I flew down the Sierras on August 2nd, 2006.

After I downloaded the flight, and reviewed it on OLC, I was a little dismayed to see the beautiful scenery that I had experienced had been reduced to a few dots on a red and yellow image...

Not happy with the results, I decided to convert the .igc file to .klm format (Google Earth), and came up with the following image: (I used the QFU website to do this.)

OK... That was a step up from my OLC rendering of the flight, but still, it had nothing to do with the day, the conditions, the cloudstreets, and the sheer beauty of the flight.

Since I had taken plenty of pictures throughout the flight, I thought of combining the above with renderings, with a picture loop of the flight:

Picture Loop (click here)

The results are pretty amazing. In fact, I began to think that all of our cross country descriptions in this website should be presented in this way - that is merging the current work of Bob Semans and others, with pictures of the different turnpoints. A small caveat: If you wish to view the pictures in the loop in high resolution, and even save them on your computer, you must download the Filmloop player. This is easily accomplished by clicking on the flash looplet within LoopL.

The possibilities of this are endless. I just made another picture loop with the steps to follow when rigging or derigging my glider. Imagine picture loops for teaching aerobatics, or simply for introducing a new pilot to a local site.

So the next time you are out flying, carry your camera along with your GPS, and post your flights in this new way!