A map of where people actually fly
The simulator will happily drop you anywhere on Earth. That is the easy part. The hard part is the question every pilot actually asks: where can I fly this thing for real?
spots.skydex.online is our answer. A catalogue of real-world places to fly, with a page per spot, a map, photos, reviews, and a link straight into the sim so you can scout the site from the air before you drive there.
The cold-start problem, and how we handled it
A community map with no spots on it is not a community map. So the catalogue is seeded from open data rather than waiting for the first hundred pilots: model-aerodrome fields and suitable open ground from OpenStreetMap, airfields from OurAirports, and FRIA sites.
Every seeded row is labelled as such. There is a filter, so you can look at only what pilots added, or only what was imported — we are not going to quietly pass off a database dump as a community.
The import is idempotent and never overwrites a claimed owner's edits, which means re-running it is harmless. Descriptions are assembled from the underlying tags, and where a place has a Wikipedia entry we pull the opening sentences in — with a visible link back, because that content is CC BY-SA and the attribution is not optional.
We do not scrape other community maps. fpv.place, FPVTrails and Bando Lovers built their own datasets and those belong to them.
Club fields are published carefully
Club sites are in the catalogue, but never as "turn up and fly". A club can lose its land over exactly that kind of listing. They are published unclaimed, marked as a club field with its access terms, and the club can take over its own page with a claim that lands in a moderation queue.
Some countries do not get a catalogue
There is a country table with three states: open, restricted, banned.
In a banned country the catalogue does not appear at all and new spots are rejected — instead there is a note pointing at the simulator, which is a legal way to fly anywhere. In a restricted country nothing is blocked; there is an informational panel, because the sky may be closed by NOTAM while authorised and enclosed sites keep operating, and treating that as the same thing would be both wrong and insulting to the people who fly there legally.
This is a hand-maintained table and it is not legal advice. It is a good-faith attempt not to publish an invitation to break the law.
What is on a spot page
Location map, photos, type and terrain, access notes, aggregate rating, reviews and comments. You can save a spot to your favourites with your own name and note for it — those show up as a layer on the world map.
There is a Fly this spot button that opens the site in the simulator at its real coordinates. Scouting a bando from 200 m up before committing a Saturday to it turns out to be genuinely useful.
Indexing is gated on content quality rather than on verification. The obvious design — only show verified spots — locks the whole thing shut on day one, because verification needs three pilots and pilots arrive from search.
Attribution for OpenStreetMap data stays visible in the footer and on every spot page. ODbL requires it, and it is the right thing anyway.