According to the actual European context, including the development of risk free residential and industrial areas, the main demand lies in instant, accurate and elaborated information regarding environment quality and pollution risks. This paper presents a conceptual architecture for a versatile, flexible, cost efficient, highspeed instrument for monitoring the air quality. In order to cover a large monitoring area, the system is placed in the luggage compartment of a glider. The glider was peculiarly selected, because, in free flight, it covers a wide areahundreds of kilometers per hour -with a reasonable speed in an economical way, may allow repetitive flight cycles at different altitudes, and, by comparing to a motorized aircraft, it caries the mobile part of the system without affecting the measurement precision by fast acceleration, vibrations, turbulences or polluting exhaust gases.The device, composed by two main physic parts: the mobile and the field components, is remotely controlled, and no kind of intervention from pilot part is requested during the flight, meaning that the measurement operation may be completely accessed from the ground anytime during flight schedules and doesn't depend on pilot knowledge or action. The mobile component is composed by an acquisition block, based on specialized gas sensors inter-connected within a prototype acquisition board, a positioning system which is represented by a GPS map 196, a laptop and a transmission module. The software platform -in terms of virtual instruments -was developed under Labview programming environment. The communication between GPS and laptop is realized by a RS232 interface, using the NMEA protocol. The information is dynamically processed, allowing both the survey and alert regimes, in order to allow the immediate pertinent decisions, directly, or by use of an expert/esurvey system. The data related to air quality map for the monitored site should be further submitted to a statistical -pollution (contamination) process -control, allowing the evaluation of: peak, average, trend and prediction of pollution, related either to temporal (season, day/night, peak hours etc.) or geographical parameters (altitude, vicinity etc.), or to atmospheric conditions (humidity, wind etc.), or even to societal demands (fuel type, production planning, urban development, or other relevant contextual circumstances). The immediate potential application lies in mapping the air pollution factors dispersion and cause identification, in order to answer to the needs of residential and industrial areas sustainable expansion, a very important problem met mainly by candidate countries to EC. KEYWORDS: remote measurements, GPS, virtual instrumentation, air quality surveillance, mobile mapping system attached to a glider. SCHREINER et al. 316