True ground track from heading calculator

True ground track and ground speed are what the aircraft actually does over the ground once wind drifts the flight path away from the nose. Pilots, flight students, and automation scripts need the full wind triangle—not only a pure-crosswind crab angle—when heading, true airspeed, and a meteorological wind vector are known and the question is where the path goes and how fast. This true ground track from heading calculator accepts heading, TAS, wind-from direction, and wind speed in matching units, resolves north and east components of the air and wind vectors, and returns ground track in degrees, ground speed, the signed wind correction angle between track and heading, plus headwind and crosswind components relative to the nose. No weather fetch, no magnetic variation table, and no network call—only the deterministic wind-triangle solve from four numbers.

What the wind triangle solves when heading is known

In flight navigation the wind triangle relates three velocity vectors: the air vector (true airspeed along true heading), the wind vector (how the air mass moves over the ground), and the ground vector (ground speed along ground track). When you already hold a heading—because that is what the compass or autopilot is maintaining—the unknown is the ground vector: the path and speed relative to the Earth. True heading is the direction the nose points through the air mass, measured clockwise from true north.

True airspeed is the magnitude of motion through that air mass. Meteorological wind is stated as a from-direction and a speed: wind from two-seven-zero at thirty knots means the air mass moves toward zero-nine-zero at thirty knots. Decompose the air vector into north and east components with cosine and sine of heading times TAS.

Decompose the wind velocity the same way but with opposite sign of the from-direction trig functions, because the velocity points one-hundred-eighty degrees from the reported from-bearing. Add the components to get ground north and ground east. Ground speed is the hypotenuse of those two components.

Ground track is the two-argument arctangent of east over north, normalized into the zero-to-three-hundred-sixty degree circle used on charts. The signed difference between track and heading is the wind correction angle for this heading-known problem: it tells how far the path has drifted left or right of the nose. Headwind and crosswind components relative to heading quantify how much of the wind opposes the nose versus comes from the right, matching the language used in takeoff and landing performance checks even when the full track solve is the primary result.

Where solving the wind triangle helps

Flight schools and ground-school apps need a deterministic oracle so every student browser and every LMS auto-grader agree on track and ground speed for the same heading, TAS, and wind. Dispatch and mission-planning tools estimate actual path and time en route when the aircraft will fly a fixed heading rather than a constant track. Failed validation does not consume balance.

Keep requests small, pin the rounded track and ground speed in tests, and you get reproducible wind-triangle results for training worksheets, route estimators, and edge workers without standing up weather or navigation infrastructure of your own. Related tools that only solve pure-crosswind crab angle or only split wind into cross and head components answer different search intents; this capability answers the heading-known ground track and ground speed question end to end.