Take Your Flying Adventure to the Next Level: Meet New Friends and Explore with Gaggle!?️

🚀Ready for an upgrade, pilots? We’re thrilled to announce the release of an exhilarating update for Gaggle, our user-friendly flight recording app! 💪 Not only have we revamped our look, but we’ve also added a bunch of new features that we truly can’t wait for our high-flying community to experience. 🚀

1. Sites Galore! 🌍

Our new feature “Sites” is ready to add a new layer of adventure to your journeys! Get access to a wide pool of paragliding sites both around you and worldwide. Each site comes with comprehensive guides detailing rules, wind directions for optimal flying conditions, and possible takeoff and landing zones. Upcoming flyable days and detailed weather forecasts with wind information up to 3000 feet above ground for each site are also available for our Adventurer plan subscribers. And there’s more! Enjoy the camaraderie of fellow pilots through the chat feature within each site. Stay tuned, as this is just the beginning of a series of exciting upgrades for “Sites”.

2. Welcoming the Community Section 🤝

Your previous home feed has evolved and transformed into a dedicated Community section. From here, get the low-down on flights you might be interested in, follow pilots in your vicinity or simply get in touch with members of your group. This section also introduces a much-awaited feature, “Group Chat” which makes planning your flights with others a total breeze. Furthermore, nearby flights are featured in the community section for you to track or join in real-time. Groups can now also be made public with a future group search making it’s way to Gaggle for you to discover groups and events that might interest you. We’ve also strengthened the security of groups by allowing you to choose if others can join when they get the invite link or if their access needs to be approved first.

3. Friends and Messaging 💌

For pilots on our Adventurer plan, Gaggle offers direct messaging with other pilots. Find new friends, share your adventures and tap into a wider community of pilots. Take your privacy up a notch by marking followers as close friends, giving you ultimate control over who sees your flights and live locations.

4. Say hello to Public Profiles 👥

Get ready for more interactions as Gaggle now features public profiles! Share your flights, your stats, and your adventures with other pilots around the world. Follow other pilots’ profiles to get notified of their flight journeys. This could be your gateway to discover new flight buddies!

5. A Refreshed Home Design 🎨

Your home screen has undergone a major facelift focusing on you and what you care about. The home screen will now display your favourite flying sites and live flight tracking for your groups and people you follow.

6. Meaningful upgrades to routes 🧭

Now you can organise your routes neatly into different folders so you don’t have to spend hours searching for the correct route anymore. While flying routes are also smarter now by knowing which routes are nearby and giving you a curated list of the routes you most likely want to fly. Lastly, routes can now be made public. Have a sweet route to fly that others should try it? Create a public route and let others discover it to go on adventures of their own.

7. Introducing the Adventurer Plan 💡

In the spirit of constantly given you more, we’re introducing a new subscription tier - The Adventurer Plan. Priced at a sweet $7 per month, this plan supports us in maintaining and enhancing the Gaggle platform. It offers a host of premium features like favouriting flying sites, 3D map views, and private messaging among other amazing additions coming your way. Our existing Frequent Flyer subscription at $4 per month still remains, now with even more value to add to your flying experience.

8. Security First! 🛡️

Rest assured, your security is, and always will be our top priority. As part of our continuous security evaluation process, we engaged the expertise of renowned security engineer, Joe Helle (@joehelle). We’re pleased to announce that Gaggle passed his security review with flying colours!

So pilots, are you ready to take to the skies with Gaggle’s latest update? Let’s soar to new heights together. Happy flying! 🕊️

For those interested in some more detail. Here is a detailed breakdown of everything new.

Sites:

1. You can create your own sites or choose from public sites.
2. Sites can be made private so only you and people you share it with can see it.
3. Sites have a “Privacy Mode” where Gaggle will automatically change your live location sharing and recording sharing settings when we detect you flying from this site. So you can have your recording sharing as public by default and set the site privacy mode to Friends Only and when you fly from this site your recording will only be shared with friends when you fly from this site.
4. Sites have a new chat feature where you can chat with other site members. Anyone who is a site admin, flies from a site, or gets invited to a site becomes a site member. Any other “observers” can also chat on public sites and see the public chat.
5. You can see a detailed 7-day weather forecast for sites with winds aloft up to 3000ft above ground. The wind guide configured for the site is used to determine flyable wind speeds and directions.
6. Using the wind guide Gaggle can show you the next 3 upcoming flyable days for a site giving you a quick at a glance view of your next flying opportunities.
7. You can configure sites guides to tell others more about a site. Suite guides are automatically merged with other public sources, where applicable, and is rewritten by a generative AI so all sites have a consistent site guide.
8. You can multiple take off and landing locations for a site, with parking locations for each so others can navigate to a site easily.
9. Anyone can request to be an admin for a public site allowing community members to update site guides and wind guides obtained from other sources.
10. Explore the site in 3d by tapping the site map, useful for paragliding pilots wanting to see what a site looks like in 3d space.
11. Navigate to any of the take off locations or parking locations by tapping the site map.

Community:

1. Groups have moved to community and can be accessed here. Groups have the following updates:
   1. You can now set a group banner in addition to the group logo.
   2. You have more control over who is allowed into a group by changing the privacy and access settings for the group so that admins need to approve any new members.
   3. Groups have an updated live tracking view for pilots.
   4. We now have a group chat feature so you can quickly message others in the group.
2. You can now see nearby active flights from the community feed.
3. Activities have changed and now have the following features:
   1. You can choose what activity you want to see by changing the Public, Groups, and Nearby toggles. Seeing activity from people you follow is the default and cannot be switched off.
   2. Activity is now sorted based on recommendations. The recommendation engine tries prioritise activity you see based on the following rules:
      1. Activity from groups and friends are more likely to be shown at the top of the list.
      2. Activity closer to your location is more likely to be shown at the top of the list.
      3. Activity from aircraft you personally fly with (paramotor, paraglider, etc) is more likely to be shown first.
      4. Activity from longer duration and distance flights have preference over shorter flights.
4. We now show nearby pilots in the activity feed so you can discover other pilots in your area that you can fly with.

Followers:

1. You can now follow other pilots and they can follow you.
2. For pilots following you, you can mark them as close friends. Pilots marked as friends will get your live location and recordings when your privacy controls as set to friends only.
3. You have to option to block followers to prevent them from seeing your activity.
4. For people you follow you can now choose how you get notified for that persons activity. You can turn on or off notifications for when they go flying or when they uploaded a new recording. You can also mute pilots to not get any notifications from them, including notifications generated from group activity.

Profiles:

1. Profiles are now public and can be viewed by others. You must have public recordings for others to see your profile. If all your flights are shared with groups or is private then your profile will be as well. You can also get a link to your profile if you want to share it but have it remain private.
2. You can now see basic stats about your profile from the profile screen:
   1. Page 1: Total lifetime flights , Total lifetime hours, Number of flights this year, Number of hours this year, Number of flights this month, days since your last flight.
   2. Page 2: Graph of your flights for the last 6 months, with a dashed line showing the previous 6 months.
3. Added a conversations navigation item so you can quickly jump back into conversations with any of your groups, sites, or private messages.
4. On public sites you will also see a persons most recent public recording.

Routes:

1. Routes have moved to the explore section under the Saved Routes navigation menu.
2. Routes can now be made public so you can make routes for everyone to enjoy without needing a sharing link.
3. Routes can now be saved into folders.

Home Screen:

1. You can see live flying right now activity from your groups and from people you follow.
2. Favourite flying sites now show on the home screen with a simplified week view showing flyable conditions for the next 7 days on each site.