angle of bank wind direction and speed atmospheric sink/lift rate wing loading/gross weightNote that the units you choose are used for all output and need not be the same as those in the actual data set. All conversions will be handled for you.
Then click on 'Show' to see the best speed to fly under these conditions, or select another option to see an analysis.
Graphs may be viewed several ways. The first two options, involving "application/x-windata" utilizes a Visual Basic program I have written for the PC called WinData, which is a general-purpose plotting program that also serves as a Netscape application for displaying graphs and associated data. Unfortunately, there appears to be a "feature" in Netscape versions higher than 3.0 which results in the program crashing if an application is used to open pages created by JavaScript (bummer!!).
Alternatively, you can use the PNG or PostScript output options, which create plots at St. Olaf College using gnuplot.pl running on the St. Olaf College web server. Alas, some browsers cannot read these files. See the above link if you have any such problem.
Note that if you have data of your own on your hard disk or Web site and you have downloaded this calculator to that site as well, then you can use your own data. If you do that, the data must be in a subdirectory just under this one by the name 'xydata' and in the proper format.
If you would like to see your glider's data on MY list, please send the data in the proper format to Bob Hanson. Be sure to indicate units!
Alternatively, you may send me a GIF or BMP image (or tell me where to find it) and I will digitize it for you WHEN I HAVE TIME. If you have Windows, you can digitize it yourself by downloading and running my PlotScan program (still kind of rough, don't expect a finished product here).