Okay, I give up; I can't find any purpose to soaring.

If it allowed you to avoid hindering terrain and such....but hovering already does that.

It wastes movement spaces.

It makes YOU a target but you can't fire back.

Nobody I play with has EVER used soaring, and now I know why....

cuts the range of mental powers by half. Sometimes it's a better idea to end your flyer in soaring just to avoid someone outwitting, purplexing, or incapacitating you, etc.

Also useful for charge or carrying figures. If you would otherwise be blocked from moving due to opposing figure bases, simply soar over them to your destination.

Or, even better, get OWAW Supes or Amazo on an outdoor map, have them wait in soaring, come down, move forward, attack, move back, move up... Repeat. This keeps people away from you, while still letting you hit them quite well.

Using it to avoid the 'mental powers' does make sense.

But hovering ALREADY ignores oppose figure bases, says the rulebook..

As for using it with Charge; it limits even further the limited Charge range and still 'wastes' moves (one move down to attack; wait a turn, as a target; then use ANOTHER move just to get back to soaring? That seems like an inefficient way to use a figure as powerful as Superman or Amazo).

Soaring is great any time that you don't want to get hit. I once had a tourney where R Steel was getting beat up on by Nightwing. If I lost Steel, it was over -- the rest of my team as ranged-combat wildcards and I would have had trouble dealing with Stealth without it. I was able to break away with Steel and move into Soaring, and thus got out of Nightwing's range.

Another trick is to have Superman and a flying TKer both start in Soaring mode. The TKer can fling Superman out there, and then your Supes can dive-bomb nearly anyone he sees. If you're using a Hypersonic Flyer, this is even better -- descend, hit someone for three clicks, pick up an object, then fly back up. The fact that you're soaring means that they will have to move, at most, to within 6 squares of you to hit you. Meaning that if they can't get rid of Hypersonic speed, then they've just set themselves up to get hit by that Heavy Object you picked up last turn.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned how soaring allows you to get on/off buildings easily...

You don't have to be in soaring to go onto buildings.