How The Pilot's Desk is built
Measured numbers
Counted by the collection, not written by hand. A figure we cannot support is left out rather than shown as zero.
- Pages
- 95,430
- Page count over time
- 95,368 → 95,430 pages measured, 30 Sep to 18 Oct
- Content last updated
- 11 Oct 2026
1st of 8 measured in Lifestyle, by sitemap URLs
As reported by the site itself
How it is built, by role
The same roles apply across the whole collection. Nothing in this block is specific to this site; what the site says about itself is quoted word for word below it.
- 1
Edge network
Visitors reach a site through an edge layer: a content delivery network with a web application firewall in front of it.
- 2
Application host
The edge talks to an application host that serves the site and renders its pages.
- 3
Data
What the pages show comes from a relational database or, for a site pre-rendered at build time, from data files built into its release.
- 4
Scheduled measurement
The collection measures its sites on a schedule: content dates and site health nightly, page counts read from each site’s sitemap weekly. Every reading is kept with its date. A site too large to re-walk is not re-measured, and shows no trend.
- 5
Public status feed
A monitoring panel sends a signed report on uptime, deploys and backups once a day, and the Operations page publishes it. A figure on this page that comes from that report says so.
In the site's own words
Each passage is copied unaltered from a page the site publishes, with the address it was taken from and the date we took it. We add nothing between them.
“The Pilots Desk is an independent, free aviation reference for pilots, student pilots, flight-sim users and anyone curious about aviation. It brings together airports, runways, frequencies, navaids, charts, aircraft, airlines, airspace, live weather, plain-English regulations and free flight-planning tools — with worldwide coverage and no login required.”
“Our goal is a single, fast, honest reference that works globally and explains things in plain English — especially the parts (regulations, METARs, NOTAMs) that are written for people who already know the jargon.”
“The site is assembled from public-domain and openly-licensed datasets, refreshed on a schedule, and rendered as static reference pages.”
