I am Bassam. I have run the operations at a US soaring club for four years — the flight log, the duty roster, the billing run, the argument about what a tow should cost. Everything free on this site is compiled by me, and I am the person to write to when it is wrong.
What this site is
Three things, for the three reasons anybody arrives. Guides on how soaring actually goes — learning it, flying further, keeping a club running. Calculators for the decisions that turn on a number rather than an opinion. And club management software, for the people who have to make the flying day happen.
The free half is not a lead magnet with the good bits removed. It is the larger half, it is ungated, and it includes the pages that argue against buying anything.
Why any of it can be trusted
Soaring is badly served by the internet. Ask what a tow costs, how many flights to solo, or which forecast is worth paying for, and you get one of two answers: nothing at all, or a figure in a forum post with no year, no club and no way to check it. Both are useless to someone about to spend money or set a price.
So the rule here is that a number gets published only if somebody else published it first, or the working is shown so you can follow it yourself. Where nobody published anything, the space stays blank. That is a slower way to build a website and it is the only version worth reading.
Wherever a stable public source exists, the figure links to it. A few do not — a study whose only copies sit behind a paywall, an industry figure that circulates without a citable original. Those say so where they appear, and name what they came from, rather than borrowing the authority of a link that is not there. Deleting them would lose real information; dressing them up as sourced would be the thing this page exists to refuse.
The sourcing rules, in full
Three of these are enforced in code, and the site refuses to start if a data file breaks them: a priced club with no source link, date and currency; a fee without its unit; a computed figure without the formula it came from. A bad edit takes down the deploy rather than quietly publishing a wrong number.
The other three cannot be machine-checked — no validator can tell whether a figure really appears on a club’s own page — so they are discipline, and the corrections address at the bottom is the check on them. Saying so seemed better than claiming an enforcement that is not there, on the page whose subject is not overstating things.
The club price census
- Every figure appears on the club's own public website
- If a club does not publish something, the key is absent. Nothing is estimated, nothing is carried over from last season, nothing comes from a forum.
- Every priced club carries a link, a date and a currency
- Shown beside the row, so you can check my work in one click. A club record with prices and no source URL will not load.
- One computation is allowed, and it is marked
- Where a club publishes a tow formula instead of a price at 2,000 ft, I do their arithmetic, print the formula verbatim, and mark the figure as calculated.
- Club dues only, never folded together with national dues
- Several clubs quote both in one line. Adding them would overstate the club's own price, so SSA dues go in the notes.
- A fee never travels without its unit
- Instruction is billed per hour by some clubs and per flight by others. A calculator that adds one as if it were the other produces a confidently wrong total, so the loader rejects the pair if the unit is missing.
- Corrections are the point
- If your club's row is wrong, tell me: I fix it, bump the checked date, and reply. That is a feature of publishing this, not an embarrassment.
The current census was compiled on 06 September 2026 by reading each club's published rates page. See the census →
Dated datasets expire loudly
The scholarship index, the forecast comparison and the glider polar library all carry a checked date, and the loader refuses to import any of them without one. A stale scholarship deadline costs somebody an application, so the failure mode is a broken build rather than a quietly wrong page.
Where a number comes from changes what it means
The polar library records how each curve was obtained, because a manufacturer's calculated figure and an independently measured one are not the same kind of number. The library contains a pair that proves it: the Grob G103 Twin II at essentially the same wing loading reads 37.0 from the factory and 33 from Richard Johnson's flight test. That 12% gap is larger than the difference between several distinct aircraft in the same list, so comparing across source classes ranks aeroplanes by who measured them. The library says so, loudly, whenever you do it →
What the calculators will not do
Every calculator states what it assumes beside the number it produces, and says plainly when nobody but me has checked it. None of them ships operating limits: no never-exceed speeds, no cockpit-load placards, no maximum masses. Those are placarded per airframe and per modification state, and a type-level number would be wrong for the pilot who most needs it.
Why the software is on the same site
GliderOps is club management software — dispatch, rosters, instruction records, maintenance and billing. It belongs here because it is the same problem continued: the calculators work a number out once, and the hard part is keeping it true through a season without anyone rebuilding a spreadsheet.
That is also why the guide to choosing club software names where we are the wrong answer. A comparison that cannot say that is an advert, and an advert would undo everything above.