XC Skies was founded in 2005 by Chris Galli, Jay Mace, and Sally Benson in Salt Lake City, Utah. Our vision is to provide a suite of applications that utilizes global forecast models to greatly enhance soaring prediction across the planet. Because soaring forecasts are so fragmented across the internet, it became obvious that a consistently operational application would greatly benefit the soaring aviation community. Although there have been attempts at providing timely soaring predictions within the sail plane community, there are virtually no large scale efforts for the hang gliding and paragliding communities on the world-wide level.

Modern compute servers are now capable of quickly crunching larger sets of data today, and their capacity will only increase with time. We are literally on the cusp of having enough processing power to effectively provide high resolution forecasting models today. When this project started 2 years ago, we gambled that technology would catch up fast enough to allow us to provide such large numerical processing at such a small granularity, while at the same time being affordable without the overhead of mass parallel processing or super computers. Earlier this year (2007), our code was optimized to finally provide reasonable forecasts timely enough to be useful.

Our vision is to continue to provide as many tools as possible within a reasonable cost window. As forecasting models improve and computers increase CPU speed and efficiency, we will add as many features and products as possible.

Who we are