Thank You Online Contest

It has been public since the beginning of September that the Online Contest (OLC) will cease operations at the end of the year. The OLC writes about this:

After its founding on the occasion of the 1999 World Gliding Championships in Bayreuth, the Online Contest (OLC), the volunteer-run portal for sport-oriented gliding, is now coming to an end after 27 years.

Even though we at WeGlide have gone our own way in recent years, we would like to pause and share a few thoughts.

Influence

The OLC has strongly shaped Johannes and me. On the one hand, through the promotion of junior pilots: For me personally, the OLC Discus was a motivation for years to improve my flying skills in order to be allowed to fly this special aircraft. In my year with the glider, I learned an incredible amount, in a way that would hardly have been possible otherwise.

On the other hand, because we spent countless hours browsing through and analyzing the flights of others. This was incredibly instructive and also provided many ideas for new routes. Many of us probably would never have started intensive cross-country flying without the OLC.

For years, the OLC set many standards on which we built WeGlide. Concepts like the 6-leg scoring can also be found on WeGlide, as we grew up with the OLC and couldn't imagine any other scoring system. For us, the OLC was and is synonymous with many things related to cross-country flying.

The idea of reporting one's flights online and comparing them decentrally seems almost trivial today. But one has to go back to a time when the internet was still in its infancy, GPS loggers were a novelty, and the digital analysis of flights was a vision. Turning this vision into reality was a pioneering achievement that laid the foundation for everything that followed.

Volunteer Work of the OLC Team

Over the last few years, our perspective on WeGlide and the OLC has changed. We have learned what a responsibility it is to operate such a platform, that good support costs a lot of time, and that a lot of work is necessary to continuously develop a mature platform.

We have developed great respect for the work of the OLC team over the past years. Not only for bringing the OLC to life, but for continuously developing it for more than 25 years and thus accompanying generations of glider pilots. We would like to thank Reiner Rose and the entire OLC family for this. Thank you for bringing the sport to where it is today.

For us, the OLC was always an incentive to further improve WeGlide, and we were quite surprised at how the OLC has reinvented itself again in recent years. Our wish is that we all view the OLC as a clear success story, and as the foundation upon which our community builds today.

Looking to the Future

At WeGlide, we feel committed to this legacy. The history of the OLC is inextricably linked with the history of gliding, and it is up to all of us to carry it forward. Our team looks to the task ahead with respect and joy. We look forward to further developing WeGlide as an open and vibrant platform together with you, the gliding community. Anyone who would like to provide additional support on this path can do so with a subscription.

In the OLC Magazine, Reiner Rose writes in response:

Thank you very much, Moritz, for the appreciation of our OLC work. What we have received from various sides makes us 'a little' proud. For example, a renowned manufacturer for electric gliding simply wrote to us: Gliding worldwide would not be where it is today if the OLC had not existed!

Unquestionably, the extraordinary recognition that the OLC received from your side is paramount. 'WeGlide', building on the experiences of the OLC, has created new features that have perfectly captured the spirit of the times. Clearly, both systems were each a reference for their own strengths. In terms of innovation, the OLC simply could not keep up with the resources available to it.

From my point of view, 'WeGlide' is now an absolutely legitimate and competent successor to the OLC, especially because it is equipped with perfect IT skills from the outset. I am happy to return the appreciation you have shown the OLC to the 'WeGlide' team.

Good luck to 'WeGlide' in the future.

Reiner