SAFA Skysailor Magazine

45 AUTUMN 2026 | March-April-May SKY SAILOR At home, it became a way to self-induce FOMO by parastalking pilots from all over the world. If you find yourself obsessively refreshing Squiggly, the treatment is simple: Call a friend and go flying. Jokes aside, Squiggly is a fantastic tool that shaped my flying, and was proudly created by one of our own: Hammed Malik. A pilot who consistently works to solve problems he sees in our community. Squiggly 2.0 has been in the works for the past couple of years, and is a funda- mental rebuild and the first step in a much more ambitious vision for how we track, experience, and share our flying days. Now entering an internal beta phase before rolling out more broadly, I asked Ham to share the story behind it. What follows is ‘The Long Road to Squiggly 2’ in Ham’s own words. The Long Road to Squiggly 2 Some of the best moments in live tracking happen when a mate is low, drifting toward the bomb-out, and you’re watching the inevitable… then their little vario chip flicks from black to green. 0.1, 0.2. You’re willing them to climb out through your phone screen, and when it turns into a proper core and they wind up? You cheer like you’re watching the State of Origin. It sounds dramatic, but paragliding days are made of tiny dramas like that. Someone’s on the deck fighting for a save. Someone else is high and gliding smoothly into the next valley. A third pilot is doing something weird that makes perfect sense to them and absolutely no sense to anyone watching. Live tracking turns all of that into a shared story. It’s not just dots on a map, it’s tension and relief and ‘how the hell did you get away with that?’ The team behind Squiggly testing its retrieve functions Squiggly run on the car navigation system