From Random Walks to Thermal Rides: Universal Anomalous Transport in Soaring Flights

Cross-country soaring flights rely on intermittent atmospheric updrafts to cover long distances, producing trajectories that alternate between rapid relocation and local exploration. From a large dataset of paraglider, hang glider, and sailplane flights, we uncover a universal transport law: beyond short ballistic times, horizontal motion is persistently sub-ballistic, with a Hurst exponent $\approx 0.88$ largely independent of aircraft type. Phase-resolved analysis using a probabilistic segmentation method shows that this scaling arises from the fundamentally intermittent, two-dimensional, and directionally correlated nature of soaring transport, in which successive ballistic segments do not add coherently. We find that learning, in the sense of experience-driven improvements in exploration and decision-making, manifests primarily in the search phase, enhancing the ability to efficiently probe the air mass and locate the next thermal. Overall, our results suggest that atmospheric structure and the generic organization of the transition-search-climb cycle dominate transport properties, placing human soaring alongside biological and physical systems where anomalous transport emerges from intermittency and persistence.

• Publication year

  2026

• Venue

  Unknown venue

• Publication date

  2026-01-03

• Fields of study

  Physics, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  arXiv 2601.01293
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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