Free · No account · Works offline

Outlanding fields, ranked by whether you can actually reach them.

A cockpit aid for glider pilots in the Alps. Nearby fields and airfields sorted by the glide ratio you would need from where you are, optionally routed around the terrain in between rather than straight through it. With the notes, photos and official charts that tell you what you are committing to — all stored on your phone, so it works with no signal.

Open the appapp.meetthecows.org Installs like an app.
Nothing to download from a store.
Field list from 3700 m over the Haute-Maurienne. Three A-rated airfields are pinned above a divider at required glide 13, 15 and 16; below it sit fields rated C at glide 8 and 10 — easier numbers, lower rank. A mountain mark beside a ratio means the glide was routed around terrain.
Detail for LFKD Sollières-Sardières: bearing, distance, required glide, arrival height, runway and frequency, then a route profile drawing the ground, the clearance line above it and the glide, meeting at Col du Fréjus — followed by pilot notes and an annotated aerial photo.

What it does

Sorted by required glide

Every field shows the glide ratio you would need from your current position and altitude — not just how far away it is.

Glide that considers terrain elevation

Turn terrain on and the required glide follows a path that stays clear of the ground instead of a straight line. A field down a valley can become reachable; one behind a ridge can stop being. Experimental, and off until you enable it.

Honest difficulty

Fields keep their Guide des Aires rating, so a short sloping meadow with ditches never looks like an aerodrome.

Notes worth reading

Real descriptions — approach, surface, hazards — translated into English, French and German, kept native in the language they were written.

Official charts included

VAC and aerodrome charts from the French, Austrian, German and Italian AIPs, bundled with the airfields they belong to.

Genuinely offline

Choose your regions once on Wi-Fi. After that the app needs nothing but GPS — no signal, no data plan, no account.

Kept current

The data rebuilds nightly and follows each AIRAC cycle, so charts do not quietly go stale in your pocket.

Install it

app.meetthecows.org
Open this in your phone’s browser, then add it to your home screen. ● Live

iPhone / iPad

  1. Open the address in Safari
  2. Tap the Share button
  3. Choose Add to Home Screen
  4. Open it from the icon, then pick your regions and download them

Android

  1. Open the address in Chrome
  2. Tap the ⋮ menu
  3. Choose Install app or Add to Home screen
  4. Open it from the icon, then pick your regions and download them

Download your regions at home, on Wi-Fi. A full set of packs is a few hundred megabytes — not something to start at the airfield.

Where the data comes from

Covering France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Austria.

Outlanding fields

planeur-net — the Guide des Aires de Sécurité and its companion field collections.

Official charts

SIA (France), Austro Control, DFS (Germany) and ENAV (Italy), each used under its own terms.

Airfield metadata

OpenAIP, used to discover and place glider-relevant airfields.

Pilot contributions

Corrections, notes and photos sent from inside the app — each one reviewed before it reaches anyone else.

Contribute

Landed somewhere and found the notes out of date? Send a correction or a photo straight from the field’s page in the app. Every submission is reviewed before it is published, and the data is better for it.

Not for primary navigation. Distance is always straight-line, and so is the glide ratio unless you switch terrain routing on. That feature is experimental, can be wrong, and is off until you enable it: it clears the ground by a margin you set, but still knows nothing of wind, sink, obstacles or airspace, and it is not a route to fly. The choice of trajectory and of landing site remains yours alone. Always check current official documents and local knowledge before flight.