Box the Wind.

Getting Started

A walkthrough to get you from a fresh install to flying a task. Follow it in order the first time — each step builds on the one before.

What Box the Wind is

Box the Wind is a map- and position-centric app for hot air balloon competition flying (BFA / FAI AX rules). It shows you the day's tasks, your live position on street or aerial maps, navigation to the active target (bearing, distance, and closest approach), wind drift, the contest area and prohibited zones, and live pilot-to-crew tracking. It works fully offline once your maps are downloaded.

The app is built around the competition 4/4 grid (a coordinate like 0280/8012 over a 1 km UTM grid). Almost everything — targets, goals, zones — is expressed in 4/4, so the first thing to set up is where that grid lives.

The screen at a glance: a glance strip across the top shows TGT / ALT / BRG / DIST / MISS for the active target plus CTR (the 4/4 under the always-on center crosshair). A status pill sits top-left. The bottom control bar holds Tasks, Declare Goal, the Map/Aerial toggle, the follow-mode button, and the Settings gear. Tap the gear to reach Source, Appearance, Grid Center, Zones, Recordings, and Offline Maps.

1. Set the grid center

The 4/4 grid is anchored to a reference center, which decides exactly where each 4/4 coordinate lands. Set this to your competition area first so every target and goal is correct.

  1. Pan and zoom the map so its center crosshair sits roughly over your launch field / contest area. Watch the CTR readout to confirm.
  2. Open Settings → Grid Center. It shows the current UTM zone and center.
  3. Tap “Use Map Center as Grid Center.” Confirm — note this also clears any offline maps tied to the old area, since they no longer match.

The 1 km grid lines and the 4/4 numbering now follow your area. (Whole-kilometre grid lines fall exactly where a 4/4 ends in 00.) You can re-center any time.

Tip: while you're set up for offline flying, open Settings → Offline Maps → “Download Offline Maps…”, tap the cells covering your area on the download grid, and download. Street and aerial imagery for those cells then render with no signal.

2. Add Red, Yellow, and Contest zones

The app starts empty — you import your own airspace and contest boundaries from KML files (the same KMLs the event director distributes).

  1. Open Settings → Zones.
  2. Use Import Red zone…, Import Yellow zone…, and Import Contest area… to load each KML. The app shows a “Found N zones” preview before saving.
  3. For contest areas, pick the single active one. That active area is what validates declared goals (see step 7) — a goal outside it is blocked.

Red and Yellow prohibited zones (PZs) draw as translucent overlays; the active contest area draws as its boundary. You can delete any imported file from this screen. Colors are fixed (red / yellow / blue boundary).

3. Load the day's tasks

Tasks come from a WatchMeFly Task Data Sheet (TDS).

  1. Tap Tasks in the bottom bar.
  2. Paste the WatchMeFly TDS URL into the Import field and tap Import. The app fetches and parses it into an editable task list. (It accepts both the structured TDS web page and many task-sheet PDFs — paste either link and it auto-detects.)
  3. Review the parsed tasks. Never trust a parse blindly — open any task to check or correct it (step 8).

Re-importing replaces the list. If a sheet has no machine-readable tasks (e.g. a scanned image), add tasks manually with the + button.

4. Set the source

The source decides where your balloon position comes from. Open Settings → Source:

For the live modes, set a Flight code and Password. The crew and pilot who enter the same code and password share a private channel — no one else can see your position. Leave the flight code empty to fly “solo” (no broadcast).

5. Recording & broadcasting

In Pilot mode, the status pill (top-left) is your Live control:

  1. Tap the pill (“Go Live”) to start. The app records your flight to a GPX file, and — if you've set a flight code — also broadcasts your position to the crew.
  2. While live the pill shows Rec mm:ss (and · solo if no flight code is set). The sensor dot turns green when GPS is good.
  3. Tap the pill again and confirm to stop. Recording continues even with the screen locked (background location).

Recordings are crash-safe and listed under Settings → Recordings, where you can rename, delete, Share, Replay, or Import a GPX. On the crew device you'll see the pilot's balloon move live, with a clear stale indicator if the link drops (never a frozen balloon shown as live).

6. Choose a target & declare goals

Choosing the active target. Most tasks have one or more published targets. In the task list, tap a task's A / B target chips to make one the active target. The glance strip then shows live BRG (bearing), DIST (distance), and MISS (closest approach on your current drift), with a green target line and a purple drift line on the map. To set a quick ad-hoc target instead, tap the map to drop one; Clear target removes it.

Declaring a goal (for pilot-declared tasks — PDG, FON). Tap Declare Goal:

  1. Pick the declared-goal task.
  2. Type the goal's EASTING / NORTHING on the 4/4 keypad — or tap “Use Crosshair Location” to drop in the map center.
  3. A live ghost pin shows your goal: green when it's inside the active contest area, red when outside. A goal outside the contest area is hard-blocked. Confirm to stamp it onto the task and make it the active target.

7. Edit tasks

Open any task from the Tasks list to edit it fully:

Edits are saved automatically and persist across launches. Because imported data is never trusted blindly, editing is the safety net — always sanity-check the day's targets before you fly.

That's it

Once your grid, zones, tasks, and source are set, the map shows everything you need in flight: your balloon, the active target with bearing/distance/miss, drift, the contest area, and your crew link. For a feature-by-feature reference, see the FAQ. Questions or bugs: support@boxthewind.com.