In my nearly 20 years of glider flying in New Zealand, I've known too many pilots who have died in gliding accidents. Occasionally the location of a crash, or even knowledge they have crashed at all, is not known for many hours or days.
Sometimes time is critical. The sooner they get medical help, the higher the chance of survival.
Every time I see another news headline 'aircraft missing', or 'hiker lost in bush' I think how this just shouldn't happen! It's a solved problem, we have the technology to ensure every person going somewhere remote can be found.
Thankfully serious accidents are rare. But we glider pilots also have a habit of landing in remote locations which is far more common. For that reason, satellite trackers are mandatory for contests in the mountains of the rugged South Island of New Zealand. Gliding NZ organisation had a map that put all SPOT trackers on the one map.
But pilots started flying with other forms of tracking including the OGN FLARM network, and cheaper cellular trackers. A system that aggregated all the data including satellite trackers into a single place was needed, and the Gliding New Zealand tracking project was created. It was a voluntary project I created in my spare time. The goals? Show where everyone flying a glider was at any time. And set up once and forget.
This worked great, but was limited to gliders in New Zealand. Paraglider pilots soon expressed interested to be tracked on the system. As were power pilots. And so, PureTrack was born, designed from scratch to work anywhere in the world, for any aircraft.
The first prototype was created in July 2021, and has been under development since then. The first user (Hi Bruno!) registered in April 2022.
Since then PureTrack has been under steady development to provide features to make it easy to find people as quickly as possible. A search tool making it easy to find any aircraft or registered paraglider pilot, anywhere in the world, within seconds.
PureTrack has also been useful for detailed track analysis tools, which have helped with accident investigations including a fatal boating accident, and a number of fatal aircraft crashes. Contest and task tools have been added making live tracking of air sports available to everyone with one link.
PureTrack Pro was created in September 2022 as a way to help fund the project, and provide the financial means to develop more advanced features. The philosophy: All safety tracking features will be free. The paid plan added extra features such as improved maps, and climb markers, so pilots can see exactly who is climbing and how fast.
Managing and developing PureTrack is now a full time project for myself. It's been a major sacrifice of normal job salary to get PureTrack to where it is today. If you'd like to support future development of PureTrack, please consider upgrading to PureTrack Pro! Every new subscription helps immensely.
Some fun stats as of September 2025 PureTrack:
We look forward to future development! Feedback welcome anytime, get in touch.
