Both endurance and horizontal velocity are important specifications for underwater gliders. In this paper,the power consumption per unit weight glider and unit horizontal velocity is used as the criterion of gliding efficiency. Taking a new flat underwater glider as the studying object,hydrodynamic forces coefficient is acquired by the method of CFD calculation in combination with model test verification,and gliding motion analysis and the vertical plane gliding motion simulation are carried out to obtain the optimized gliding parameters of a new flat underwater glider. The gliding performance calculation method established in this paper has important application value for the hydrodynamic performance design and gliding parameters optimization of flat underwater gliders.