The instrumentation has advanced tremendously in the last several years and the cockpit now has a modern computer which contains the needed navigational information. "It automatically calculates their average climb, what the current speed is, and they have calculators that tell them how much altitude they need to get back to this airport,” Jim Cole said. Cole is the President of Blue Ridge Soaring Society. He also noted that all of the scoring is done off the instrumentation of the GPS, which is on each plane and logging the entire time.
