Vulture

Vulture is a planning and analysis app for glider pilots, built natively for the entire Apple ecosystem — iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. It follows a pilot through the whole arc of a soaring day: planning the task on the ground, recording the flight in the air, and making sense of it afterwards. The tagline puts it plainly — it's there to elevate your gliding experience.

Plan

Before take-off, pilots build a task from scratch or import one from Soaring Spot. SkySight weather is overlaid directly on the map so all the essentials sit in a single view, and finished tasks export to cup, LXNAV Nano or flarmcfg files, ready to load onto an IGC-approved device.

Fly

In the air, Vulture records the flight on iPhone or Apple Watch — recording starts automatically on acceleration, and the flight is saved on landing as an IGC file. A live map shows current position alongside airspace and loaded waypoints, and pilots can select any waypoint to navigate straight to it.

Analyse

After landing, flights can be imported from an IGC file or pulled in from platforms like WeGlide, SkyLines and Soaring Spot. Pilots review one or several flights side by side, study data graphs, and relive the flight through replays. Detailed calculations cover optimised distance, altitude gained, longest leg, soaring duration and airspace infringements. Everything — flights, tasks, waypoints and airspace — syncs across devices through iCloud, and finished flights can be uploaded to services like WeGlide, SkyLines and Soaringlab.

The challenge

Vulture is a deceptively large surface for a single product. It spans four Apple platforms at once, each with its own constraints — including an Apple Watch that has to log a flight reliably on limited resources. It has to speak the soaring community's file formats and integrate with the tools pilots already use, from SkySight and openAIP to WeGlide, FLARM and LXNAV devices. It has to work offline and stay dependable in the air, then sync cleanly through iCloud once back on the ground. And the analysis side leans on real aviation calculations — optimised distance, airspace infringements — where the numbers simply have to be right.

My role

Vulture is my own product. I designed, built and have maintained it single-handedly since 2019 — the native Swift apps across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch, the supporting Ruby backend service, and the vulture.aero marketing site. Every part of it, from the file parsing and third-party integrations to the UI and the App Store presence, is something I own end to end.

Outcome

Vulture is a shipping, actively maintained App Store product, offered with a two-week trial. It gives glider pilots a single companion that covers planning, flying and analysis across all their Apple devices, and connects to the services the soaring community already relies on.