How do I fly the route before I ride it?
Updated
Tap Fly the route on any day of an event. Windline flies the route over satellite imagery, coloured by the wind at the hour you’ll be on each stretch, with the climbs, gusts, rain and temperature, and a check of every 100 m of road: tar or gravel, on a mapped road or not, bikes allowed or not. It opens in the browser on a phone or computer.
Open it
- Riders: on a day’s page, tap Fly the route, below the forecast.
- Organisers: in the dashboard, open a day and tap Fly the route at the top. It works on drafts too, before anything is published.
- iPhone app: open a day and tap the teal Fly the route button on the day sheet.
It opens on the whole route, then flies down to the start. Tap Play to ride it. Drag along the elevation profile at the bottom to jump anywhere. Whole route zooms back out, and dragging the map lets you look around (Play picks the rider back up).
What you see
The card shows where you are and what it’s like there:
- the distance and the time you’ll be there;
- the road, e.g. “Tar · R564 · Secondary road”;
- the wind against your direction of travel;
- the temperature, height and gradient;
- how much you’ve climbed and descended, and how much is still to climb.
Tap Layers (on a phone, the button at the top right) to switch these on or off. They’re the same on the web and in the iPhone app:
- Wind, moving air: streaks drifting with the wind, faster and brighter when it’s stronger.
- Wind arrows: where the air is going, every 1.5 km, coloured tailwind, side-on or headwind.
- Gusts, Rain and Temperature: labels where they matter (gusts of 35 km/h (22 mph) or more, rain of 0.2 mm (0.01 in) an hour or more). Labels appear as you get close.
- Colour the route by Wind, Heat, Climb or Surface. The road and the profile both change, with a key.
The route check
Every 100 m of the route is checked against OpenStreetMap, the open map of the world’s roads, for:
- whether it’s on a mapped road at all;
- tar or gravel;
- roads where bikes aren’t allowed, such as freeways;
- private roads.
The panel shows the share on mapped roads and the share on tar, then lists anything worth a look, e.g. “Private road · km 20.8 · 500 m”. Tap one to fly there.
The check is only as good as the map. A road can be missing, or its surface not recorded (“Surface not mapped”). A flag means: look at it before you send riders there.
When the forecast isn’t out yet
Forecasts reach 10 days ahead. For a day further out, the flyover uses tomorrow’s weather at the same start time, and says so on the card (“Tomorrow’s weather”), until the day’s own forecast opens. Under When you ride you can also compare any of the next nine days.
Units
Distances, speeds, heights and temperatures follow your units setting in Windline (Account on the web, Settings in the app). Without one, they follow your device’s region: miles, mph, feet and °F in the United States, kilometres and °C in most other places.
Where it works
In any modern browser on a phone or computer, and in the iPhone app. On the web the imagery is satellite, from Esri; in the app it’s Apple’s satellite imagery with real elevation. The roads and buildings come from OpenStreetMap, and the forecast from Apple Weather, the same as everywhere else in Windline.