airspaces.app

What It Is

Airspaces is an online or desktop map tool for the X-Plane flight simulator, used to view single-player or multiplayer flight sessions. It comes in three forms: a public online Airspace, a self-hosted Airspace, and a legacy desktop client. The public version is suited to “flying with the whole world,” while the self-hosted and desktop versions are more geared toward private sessions among friends.

Core Capabilities

From a developer-tool perspective, Airspaces is built around receiving X-Plane’s UDP data output and displaying aircraft positions on a map. The documentation explicitly requires enabling UDP output for data rows 20 and 104 in X-Plane 10/11, and sending the data to the specified IP address and port. For self-hosting, the project provides a Docker image; mapping API port 9000 and X-Plane UDP port 49003 is enough to run the backend. If Docker is not an option, you can also run the Node.js backend yourself and host the ReactJS client. The main documentation states that both the backend and client are open source, with issues and code contributions supported through GitHub.

Pricing and Maintenance Status

The page does not provide commercial pricing information. It is more of a free-to-use model with PayPal donations, which go toward development costs such as servers and certificates. One thing to note is that the desktop version is explicitly no longer receiving new features; the version comparison table also shows “No” for “Will be receiving new features” across all versions. This suggests the project is currently more of a stable maintenance or personal project than a fast-iterating product.

Pros and Cons

The advantages are its clear positioning and straightforward setup path: the public service provides a fixed IP and port, while the self-hosted version can be started with a single Docker command. Its open-source nature also lowers the cost of redeployment and review. The downsides are its relatively narrow feature scope: customization is marked as unsupported, the public version cannot be limited to flying only with friends, and the self-hosted version cannot connect to the global public session. The Docker image also does not yet include the client, so the frontend still needs to be built from the frontend subdirectory, making it less friendly for non-technical users.

Who It’s For and Access from China

Airspaces is suitable for X-Plane players, virtual aviation groups, and technical users who want to set up a private shared-flight map. It is not ideal for teams that need complex permission management, long-term commercial support, extensive API documentation, or continuous product iteration. The text does not provide information on access from mainland China; the actual availability of the public service and dependencies such as GitHub and PayPal should be tested independently.