How GAP Scoring Works

GAP is the scoring system used at most paragliding (PG) and hang gliding (HG) cross-country competitions worldwide. It is maintained by the FAI/CIVL (the international body that governs free-flight sports) and defined in Section 7F of the FAI Sporting Code.

The name "GAP" comes from its original creators — Gerolf Heinrichs, Angelo Crapanzano, and Paul Mollison — who designed it in the early 2000s. It has been refined many times since then.

The core idea is simple: a perfect task day is worth 1000 points. Those 1000 points are divided among four categories — distance, time, leading, and arrival — and each pilot receives a share of the available points based on how they performed relative to the other pilots. If the task day wasn't ideal (few pilots launched, nobody flew far, etc.), the task is worth fewer than 1000 points.

If you've never flown a competition task before, here's how it works:

The task committee defines a route as a series of turnpoints — GPS coordinates with a cylinder radius around each. Pilots must fly through (or into) each cylinder in order. A typical task looks like this:

• Launch — Where pilots take off. You must be at launch to be scored.
• Start of Speed Section (SSS) — Where your timed run begins. In a race to goal your clock starts at a fixed start gate time (the last gate at or before your crossing); in an elapsed-time task it starts the moment you cross the cylinder.
• Turnpoints — Intermediate waypoints you must tag in order. You "tag" a turnpoint by flying into its cylinder (typically 400m–2km radius).
• End of Speed Section (ESS) — The finish line for timing. Your speed section time stops here. In many tasks, ESS is the last turnpoint before goal.
• Goal — The final turnpoint. Reaching goal means you completed the task. In PG, you must reach goal (not just ESS) to receive time points.

Your speed section time is measured from when you cross SSS to when you reach ESS. Your flown distance is measured along the optimized route through the turnpoints you reached.

Not every task day deserves a full 1000 points. If conditions were poor and most pilots bombed out near launch, the scores should count for less in the overall standings. GAP handles this with task validity — a multiplier between 0 and 1 that scales the available points.

Task validity is the product of three independent sub-validities:

The overall task validity is:

$\text{Task Validity} = \text{Launch Validity} \times \text{Distance Validity} \times \text{Time Validity}$

And the total available points for the task are:

$\text{Available Points} = 1000 \times \text{Task Validity}$

On a great day with good conditions, task validity will be close to 1.0 and there will be nearly 1000 points on offer. On a poor day, it might drop to 200–400 points.

The available points are divided among four categories. The split depends on how many pilots made goal — this is called the goal ratio.

• Distance Points — Reward how far you flew. Always the largest share.
• Time Points — Reward how fast you completed the speed section. Worth more when many pilots make goal.
• Leading Points — Reward pilots who led the way at the front of the pack (also called "departure points"). On by default; a competition can switch them off.
• Arrival Points — Reward early arrival at ESS. Hang gliding only — on by default for HG, and can be switched off.

When nobody makes goal, almost all points go to distance. As the goal ratio increases, more points shift to time and leading. This makes sense — if everyone completed the task, the interesting question is who was fastest, not who flew farthest.

The weight of each component is calculated from a polynomial formula based on the goal ratio. For example, when the goal ratio is 0 (nobody made goal), the distance weight is about 0.9 (90% of points). When 50% of pilots make goal, the distance weight drops to about 0.55.

Every pilot who launches receives distance points, making this the "bread and butter" of your score. For paragliding, the formula is a straight proportion of how far you flew:

$\text{Distance Points} = \dfrac{\text{Your Distance}}{\text{Best Distance}} \times \text{Available Distance Points}$

The pilot who flew the farthest gets the full distance points. Everyone else gets a proportional share based on how far they flew. For hang gliding, half of the points use this proportion and the other half use a "difficulty" measure (see below).

Time points reward pilots who completed the speed section quickly. The key rules:

• Paragliding: You must make goal to receive any time points ( §12.1 — this discourages high-speed final glides low to the ground).
• Hang gliding: You must reach ESS to receive time points — and reaching goal validates them: a pilot who crosses ESS but lands before goal keeps only 80% of their time and arrival points by default ( §12.1 ; the share is configurable per competition under Advanced scoring settings). Distance and leading points are unaffected.

If you're eligible, your time points are based on your speed fraction — a value between 0 and 1 that measures how close your time was to the fastest pilot's time:

$\text{SF} = \max\!\left(0,\; 1 - \left(\dfrac{\Delta t}{\sqrt{t_{\text{best}}}}\right)^{5/6} \right)$

Where $\Delta t$ is the difference between your time and the best time (in hours), and $t_{\text{best}}$ is the fastest pilot's time (in hours). The 5/6 exponent is the current FAI S7F value and the default for both sports. A competition can instead select the older 2/3 exponent (the GAP2016/2018 curve), which is slightly more generous — it's a per-competition setting, chosen independently of the leading-coefficient variant. The per-pilot score analysis names the exponent that was applied.

The best time is the fastest pilot in goal for paragliding ( §11.2.1 ). For hang gliding — matching AirScore — it is the fastest pilot to reach ESS whenever the ESS-but-not-goal share above keeps part of the time points (the default), so the docked pilots' speed fractions stay on the same scale; if a competition sets that share to 0%, the best time is taken from goal pilots exactly as the spec reads.

This creates a generous curve: pilots close to the fastest time get nearly full points, and the penalty increases gradually for slower times. It's not a cliff — finishing 10 minutes behind the winner still earns you a good share of time points.

$\text{Time Points} = \text{SF} \times \text{Available Time Points}$

One thing to be aware of: in a race-to-goal task with start gates, your clock runs from the start gate you took — the last gate at or before your start-cylinder crossing — not from the crossing itself ( §8.3.1 ). Cross at 13:49 with gates at 13:30/13:50 and your clock has been running since 13:30. Elapsed-time tasks are timed from your actual crossing. GlideComp scores both per the spec, and the per-pilot score analysis shows which gate you took alongside your crossing time.

Leading points (sometimes called "departure points") reward pilots who take the risk of flying at the front of the gaggle and leading the way towards goal. Without this incentive, the optimal strategy would be to wait in a thermal and let others do the pathfinding.

Leading points are on by default for both categories (the FAI formula), and a competition can switch them off. PG competitions give leading points a higher weight than HG, since paragliding has no arrival term to share the non-distance points with.

Hang gliding only. Arrival points reward pilots based on their order of arrival at ESS. The first pilot to reach ESS gets the most arrival points, and later arrivals get progressively less.

The first arrival receives roughly 100% of the available arrival points, while the last arrival still receives about 20%. The curve is defined by a polynomial that ensures even late arrivals get meaningful points.

Arrival points are on by default for hang gliding and can be disabled in competition settings. They do not apply to paragliding competitions.

Your total score for a task is the sum of your four component scores. Following the spec ( S7F §11 ), it is rounded to one decimal place — and any penalties are subtracted before that rounding ( §12.4 ), so the rounding is always the last step:

$\text{Total} = \text{round}_{0.1}\!\left(\text{Distance} + \text{Time} + \text{Leading} + \text{Arrival} - \text{Penalties}\right)$

A pilot's score can never go below zero, no matter how large the penalty. Pilots are ranked by this total (highest first); in case of a tie, the pilot with the greater flown distance is ranked higher. The scoreboard displays these totals as whole points, but the underlying one-decimal value is what drives ranking and tie-breaks.

GlideComp implements the core GAP formulas from the 2024 edition of the CIVL Sporting Code Section 7F, and its results are validated against real AirScore-published competition scores. The validity polynomials, weight distributions, and point formulas follow the official specification, but not every feature of the full spec is implemented, and in a few places the behaviour deliberately or currently differs — those differences are called out explicitly in the next section.

New competitions default to the official CIVL GAP settings for their category — leading points on for both, arrival and distance-difficulty on for hang gliding — so scores match a standard FAI/AirScore event out of the box. See Default Competition Settings for the full list; any of them can be changed under the competition's Advanced scoring settings.

The scoring engine source code is open and available on GitHub .

• CIVL Sporting Code Section 7F — XC Scoring (2024 Edition)
  The definitive specification. Contains all formulas, coefficients, and rules including penalties, stopped tasks, and series scoring.
• FAI/CIVL — International Hang Gliding and Paragliding Commission
  The governing body that maintains the GAP scoring rules and organizes World and Continental championships.
• FAI Sporting Code
  The full collection of FAI sporting codes across all air sports. Section 7 covers hang gliding and paragliding.