Every pilot planning a trip to Valle del Cauca asks the same question: “What’s the flying like in [month]?” The honest answer has always been unsatisfying. Ask five people and you get five different answers – usually anchored to the best week someone personally experienced, or vague seasonal impressions. “The convergence gets weird in October.” “February is usually strong.” That’s not information you can build a trip around.

We built something better.

Historical XContest Data, Now on the Site

Skyoutpg.com/flying-conditions now shows historical XContest flight data for both Piedechinche and Roldanillo. The data covers weekly top-10 flights going back to 2024, and updates automatically every week. Filter by site and month, and you see what the top pilots at each location actually flew during those weeks – average distances, peak performances, week-to-week consistency.

This is not someone’s memory of a good trip. It’s recorded flight data from XContest, the most complete public record of tracked XC flights in the region.

Why Anecdotes Fail Trip Planning

When a pilot asks about March flying at Piedechinche, they’re asking a statistical question – but they’ve been getting narrative answers. “March was incredible last year” is a data point of one. It tells you nothing reliable about what March generally produces, whether last year was an exception, or how consistently conditions cooperate across multiple years.

Pilots who live here or visit repeatedly develop an intuitive sense of the seasonal patterns. That knowledge is real and valuable. But it’s not easily transferred to someone planning a first trip or deciding between a June and an August window. Personal experience is always a sample from one season, from one perspective, remembered through the filter of the best and worst days.

Data sidesteps this. Not because numbers are smarter than experience – they’re not – but because they’re honest about what’s typical rather than what was memorable. The pilot who had a 120km week in May remembers May as extraordinary. The data shows you how often May weeks produce that, versus how often they produce 40km.

How to Read the Data

Go to /flying-conditions, select a site, and filter by month. What you see is every week we have on record for that month, with the top-10 distances from XContest.

Three things to look at:

  • Average distance across the top 10. This is your signal for a typical productive week. A 60km average means solid flying was happening. A 25km average means conditions were limiting even the best pilots on the leaderboard – thermals not connecting, overdevelopment cutting things short, or the sea breeze winning early.
  • Variance week to week. If one week shows 80km averages and the next shows 30km, the month is inconsistent – you might hit either window, and planning around it is harder. Low variance in one direction means the month is reliable, for better or worse. That’s information worth having before you book flights.
  • Peak individual flights. The longest flights in any given week show you what the ceiling looks like when everything aligns. If the best March flight in the database is 95km, you know the site and conditions can support that kind of flying. If March peaks at 55km, your goal-setting should adjust accordingly.

This is not a forecast tool. It does not predict what next June will look like. It tells you what past Junes actually produced – which is the most honest answer available, and usually more useful than a seasonal ranking that someone wrote once and never updated.

What Two Years of Data Shows

The pipeline has been running since early 2024, which gives us over 100 weeks of weekly records across both sites. Some things that show up clearly in the data:

Piedechinche rewards pilots who can push transitions and work the back country. The top flights on strong weeks extend well beyond the main ridge, and the week-to-week range is wide – it’s a site that can produce exceptional flying when conditions cooperate, but the top-10 averages drop more sharply in off weeks than Roldanillo’s do. Roldanillo produces more consistent distances across the top 10 on productive weeks, which reflects the geography and how the Cauca Valley convergence sets up across a wider front.

These patterns aren’t news to pilots who fly both sites regularly. But seeing them in the numbers makes the distinction concrete and lets you match the site to what you’re looking for on a given trip – high ceiling with more variance, or more consistent performance with a lower peak.

The data also shows something that experienced local guides know well: a “good month” contains underperforming weeks, and a “shoulder month” contains weeks that produce serious flights. The historical record shows this variance rather than flattening it into a single seasonal rating. For trip planning, that’s more useful than a best-months list – it shows you what you’re actually betting on when you book a specific window.

Why XContest

XContest is the most complete public record of tracked XC flights at these sites. Not every pilot uploads, and not every flight makes it in – but the pilots flying at the top of the leaderboard week after week log consistently, which makes the top-10 data reliable as a signal of what conditions allowed. A week where the top 10 averaged 70km happened because the air made it possible. A week where they averaged 28km reflects real limitations in the conditions, not a slow news cycle.

The data pulls directly from XContest’s public rankings, stored in a local database, cumulative. Each week adds to the historical record. The longer this runs, the more useful the comparisons become – particularly as we accumulate enough data to compare 2025 patterns against 2024 for the same month, and start seeing what’s seasonal versus what’s annual variation.

Expand to Other Sites

Right now the tool covers Piedechinche and Roldanillo because those are the sites Skyout operates from. But the pipeline is built to add locations, and XContest has data for other Colombian sites – San Gil, Bucaramanga, other Valle del Cauca areas where pilots travel for cross-country.

If there’s a site that matters to you – another Valle del Cauca location, or somewhere else in Colombia – leave a comment below or send us a message and we’ll look at adding it. Especially useful: if you fly regularly at another site and can tell us whether the XContest leaderboard there reflects real flying activity. The data is only as meaningful as the participation rate, and you’ll know better than we do whether local pilots are logging consistently at a given site.

The flying conditions page is deliberately simple at launch – filter by site and month, look at the numbers, draw your own conclusions. That’s the tool doing its job. More visualization options are on the list; for now, the weekly data is there and filterable, which already answers the core question better than any single conversation could.

Ready to fly Colombia? Join one of our tours and plan around data instead of guesswork.