Meeting Points or Pilots Meeting…

... OLC offers an interesting new Feature

... OLC offers an interesting new Feature

OLC-Innovations_600x#11F658Before joining our club’s pilots meeting this morning I had a quick look into OLC’s news. No record flights yesterday… but I found an interesting new feature called “MeetingPoints” on their website. Pilot meeting, meeting point? A little confused, I tried to find out more and figured that once you log into your OLC-account, you will now be able to see whom you met during a flight. Wow! I remember a number of flights during which I had short encounters with several different gliders and could not identify all of them. Once I was followed by someone whom I could see on my FLARM, but without a submitted callsign… Sometimes I later learned about those “ghosts” by browsing OLC’s information, at times the “objects” simply remained unidentified though.

Unfortunately the news about the latest tracking-options are not yet translated into English, but it’s definitely worth checking them out. Maybe this weekend you’ll get a first good chance to do so? MeetingPoints is also ready to be used to look at past flights. If for example you search for a 2012-WGC flight you will obviously see a lot of meetings. The new feature informs about the duration of a meeting; you can identify the aircraft, the pilot’s name and your friend’s or competitor’s callsign. Flying together with a partner you will of course have a more extended meeting. Here is an example where you can see Sebastian Kawa and Uys Jonker flying together for a long time.

Just hit the little box on the left to the pilot met, and you will find how these two guys shared the road. If this does not work with your regular Internet Explorer, you should ask Firefox or Google Chrome for help!

Occasionally you might encounter other flying objects like para- or hang-gliders, or even model airplanes up above a ridge. MeetingPoints will help you to identify them later – as long as they post their flights on OLC – which is not uncommon in Europe. To me, OLC’s latest innovation seems a great idea and I will definitely check out this new feature. Following pilot’s “needs” the IT-team is also working on a map display where you will one day be able to compare different flights. Sounds great! So, who ever you are, see you later somewhere in the air!