YAW

YAW is a digital operating layer for soaring, built to pull the scattered pieces of a glider pilot's life into one place. At its center is an intelligent logbook, but it reaches further than that, into currency tracking and a soaring-specific weather forecast. The pitch on the homepage is blunt, every flight captured, so your flying history stays searchable, shareable, and current instead of trapped on paper that fades. It's made by Sideslip Ltd, and the team describes itself as pilots building the tool they wanted to fly with rather than a marketing shop selling software to pilots.

The case it makes is that soaring has been poorly served by software. A pilot's history tends to scatter across paper that fades, IGC files nobody opens twice, and a currency sum done from memory on the drive to the field, and then a weather tab, a tasking app, and the club chat pile on top, so there are five places to check before a wheel has even left the ground. YAW's answer is to fold those essentials into one place, without pretending to replace the flight computer in the cockpit.

The headline trick is turning a paper logbook into a living record. You photograph the pages and YAW rebuilds your history flight by flight, so years of entries come across in minutes rather than a long evening of manual typing. Flights recorded by a logger import from their IGC traces on their own, and anything flown without a logger goes in by hand. It totals hours by aircraft type, tallies badge legs and running totals for you, and signs each record cryptographically so the numbers stand up to scrutiny. You can hand anyone a read-only link to the whole logbook, which makes it easy to show progress to an instructor or a club. A worked example on the site, a shared logbook of thirty flights totaling around forty-two hours, shows the format in full, down to a currency panel that flatly reads not current when the numbers fall short.

The second piece is currency, the running set of rules that decide whether you're legal and safe to fly. YAW models the SFCL clocks that matter under the newer sailplane licensing regime, tracking hours, launches, training flights, launch types, the ninety-day passenger rule, and your medical. One tile surfaces whatever expires next with a countdown and a note on what to do about it, so the sum you normally work out in your head on the drive to the field is already done for you.

The third piece answers the question every pilot asks the night before, is tomorrow soarable. Rather than a generic is-it-sunny widget, YAW translates the forecast into pilot language, showing cloudbase, the working band, trigger time, and rough task-distance potential for a specific site. It pulls from RASP, the Met Office, soundings, and satellite data, then presents a single window that tells you whether it's worth loading the trailer. Put together, those three features form a daily loop the site lays out plainly, plan, fly, log, and know what's next. It's built for students and club pilots working toward Bronze and Silver, for cross-country pilots chasing distance and badges, and for instructors and clubs keeping an eye on syllabus and currency across their members.

Where it stands apart is how narrowly it's aimed. It's pilot-native rather than adapted from powered aviation, built around the newer SPL regime and its SFCL currency rules instead of a generic logbook, and it keeps machine learning quiet, using it for synthesis and translation where it earns its place rather than as a headline. The founder, a lead AI engineer and a club soaring pilot, started it after one too many nights stitching together weather tabs, paper entries, and a spreadsheet of currency clocks. It positions itself deliberately alongside the established soaring names pilots already know, the likes of WeGlide, SeeYou and SkySight, by owning the licensing and currency side rather than competing head on for tracing and analysis. The site ships in English, German, French, Italian, and Polish, a nod to the European clubs it's built around.

On access, YAW is a paid product and it's still gathering pilots ahead of launch. The launch price is fifty pounds a year for the full logbook, currency tracking, and forecast, with a promise that an early price stays put for as long as you're subscribed while the standard rate rises to ninety pounds a year afterward. There's also a one-off Founding Pilot option at a hundred and fifty pounds for lifetime access plus direct input into what ships next. The fully worked shared-logbook demo is live on the site, so you can see the format before you register interest.