Worldwide Soaring Turnpoint Exchange

Distance - Heading Matrix

These may be useful for task planning, and for some flight computers [ e.g. Zander 820 ] that provide task navigation independent of a GPS.

The turnpoints and their three-letter ID's are listed along the left hand side, and just the three-letter ID's are listed across the top, bottom, and right hand side. The three-letter ID's are listed across the bottom and the right hand side just to help you make sure that you are following the correct column or row.

The distance between two turnpoints is found by finding the first one along the left hand site, and noting its three-letter abbreviation, and then reading down to the the second turnpoint. Then read across until you get to the column with the three-letter abbreviation of the first turnpoint. That should contain the distance between them.

The course between the two turnpoints is found above the diagonal, so just find the intersection of the row for one turnpoint and the column for the other. The sense of the heading is "from" the turnpoint along the left-hand side "to" the turnpoint along the top.

This sounds more complicated than it is. For example: 

                          TP1  TP2  TP3  TP4  TP5
          Turnpoint 1 TP1  -                  h15 TP1
          Turnpoint 2 TP2       -   h23           TP2
          Turnpoint 3 TP3      d23   -            TP3
          Turnpoint 4 TP4                 -       TP4
          Turnpoint 5 TP5 d15                  -  TP5
                          TP1  TP2  TP3  TP4  TP5
"d23" should contain the distance from Turnpoint 3 to Turnpoint 2, and vice versa, and "h23" should contain the heading from Turnpoint 2 to Turnpoint 3. The heading from Turnpoint 3 to Turnpoint 2 is just the reciprocal; we wouldn't want to do all the work for you!! "d51" should contain the distance from Turnpoint 1 to Turnpoint 5, and "h51" should contain the heading from Turnpoint 1 to Turnpoint 5.

As the layout is a bit large for printing, you have two options to facilitate this:

  1. You man download the text version, and format it with your wordprocessor for printing. You'll want to select the "landscape" layout [ i.e. sideways on the page ], and choose a small, constant width font [ e.g. courier ] to keep the columns lined up, and fit all of the text on a page.

    or

  2. You may download the "PDF" file, indicated by , which is already formatted for printing sideways [ "landscape mode" ] on 8 ½ × 11 or A4 paper. If you haven't already, you will need to download the Adobe Acrobat® PDF viewer [ for Windows, Macintosh, DOS, Unix ] which is free.
    This link provides the program, and everything you need to get it going on your computer and linked into your browser. More and more WWW services are using this standard, and sooner or later you'll want to have it available. It is typically much smaller (quicker to download) than the "HTML" version.

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Please contact John Leibacher with any suggestions concerning this material.