A flight simulator page, and what you can fly today
People find Skydex by searching for a flight simulator. Bing already shows our front page for "flight simulator online" and "fly in your web browser", and a good share of those visitors have never heard of the game. The front page talks about catching aircraft and ships, which is what regulars care about. A newcomer asking "what can I fly here?" had to take off to find out.
So there is now a page for exactly that question: skydex.online/flight-simulator.
What's on it
The craft. All twelve, in a table: the two gulls and ten drones, from the 65 mm Air65 whoop to the 900 mm heavy lifter. Each drone row shows the frame size, the weight, the thrust-to-weight ratio and, for the camera and cargo drones, the payload. These are the same numbers the flight model uses. The whoop weighs 18 g and pulls about 6.4 times its weight, while the Speed X frame pulls 11 times its weight and tops out near 300 km/h. The page reads them from the game's own list, so a new drone shows up there on the day it lands in the game.
The modes and the controls. Angle mode levels the drone for you, and acro mode leaves the rotation to your sticks. R switches between them. A gamepad works as it is, and so does an RC transmitter plugged in as a USB joystick, with its own calibration screen. Phones get touch controls, and Meta Quest and PICO headsets enter VR from the browser.
Where you fly and who's around. The real Earth at 1:1, photorealistic 3D cities where Google has them, OpenStreetMap everywhere else. The aircraft and ships around you are real ones our receivers hear, and the page shows how many right now.
The race tracks. There are nineteen tracks in sixteen cities, each with a public leaderboard and a ghost of the best run. More on them in race track pages.
Can you fly a plane?
Not yet, and the page says so in its first questions. You fly a gull or a drone, and the airliners, business jets and helicopters you see are real aircraft you can catch with the binoculars. We'd rather someone looking for a cockpit learns that from the search result than from the game.
The page is in all twelve languages, with titles written for how people search in each one ("symulator lotu w przeglądarce", "Flugsimulator im Browser" and so on). There's a Markdown copy at /flight-simulator.md for AI assistants, and short clips of real flights are on the videos page (see flight videos).
To try it, open the page and press Fly now, or pick a race and fly against the ghost.