The contributor programme

What it is

We are building a record of what happens inside a paraglider wing in flight. There is no such record anywhere, which is the whole reason the company exists, and the only way to build one is for pilots to fly and send us what they flew.

If you want to do that, you upload the flights you were flying anyway and take a few minutes afterwards to tell us what was going on. That earns points. That is the whole programme.

It is not part of what you bought. You can ignore this page entirely, fly your unit for years, upload nothing, and you still own it outright and nothing about your account is different.

What points are, and what they are not

Points are not money. They have no cash value. They cannot be withdrawn, transferred, sold, given away or converted into anything else. There is no exchange rate and we do not publish one, because there is not one to publish. If you leave the programme, or the programme ends, points do not turn into a refund, a credit or a payment, because they were never any of those things.

What they do. They redeem against our own reading of your flying, and nothing else: a deeper look at your own flights, comparative site and season data, wing-specific pressure profiles, longer history and export. That is what we have that you cannot get elsewhere, and it is the only thing we are offering.

No physical goods, no hardware, no discounts, no cash equivalents. Not now and not later without the whole structure being looked at again.

What a flight is worth to the record

Not its length. An hour is an hour, and we already hold a lot of hours. What we are short of is variety, so a flight scores on how much of what we do not already hold it supplies:

• The wing. A model we have little or nothing of is worth more than a fifth session on one we know well.
• Its certification class. Some classes are barely represented at all.
• The site and the terrain. Coastal, inland, flatland, winch — they are different problems and we hold them unevenly.
• The season and the time of day. We have June and July mornings. Autumn and winter, and evenings, are gaps.
• How the sensors were mounted. Varying the installation tells us things about the instrument itself, and it costs you nothing in the air.
• Whether you did the notes afterwards. This is paid for completing the pass, not for what it says. Writing "nothing unusual" counts exactly the same as writing anything else.

The same flying, on the same wing, at the same site, in the same conditions is worth steadily less each time. That is deliberate. There is no total to reach and nothing that completes.

What this data is for

ParaBaro records what happens to your wing. It does not detect or predict collapses and it will not warn you about one. Closing that gap is what this data is for.

We would rather say that plainly on the page that asks you for recordings than have you infer, reasonably, that people asking for this must already know how to read it. We do not yet.

Three things to read before you start

Nothing here is a suggestion about what or when to fly. This board describes gaps in our data. It does not know your site, your day, your hours or your wing, and it never will.

Every flying decision stays yours, made the way you made it before you had one of these. If a decision would come out differently because of points, that is the decision to leave alone.

Not contributing costs you nothing. There is no penalty, no ranking, nothing to lose and no comparison with anyone else. A flight you decided not to fly is a flight you decided not to fly.

Joining, and leaving

You join by uploading a flight. You leave by not uploading one. There is no enrolment, no commitment, no minimum and no notice period, and we do not send reminders — if you want to know what we are short of, you come and look.

Your flights stay yours throughout. You can export them or delete them from your dashboard whenever you like, and what we use for research is anonymised. The detail is in the Privacy Policy.

The formal terms

Being written. The formal terms of this programme are being drafted with our accountant and will be published before the programme opens. We have deliberately not put a tidy paragraph here in the meantime. What is on this page is a description, not a contract.