Custom Spain and Portugal scenery

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In 2012, the Spanish community of FlightGear at Vive FG! began a project to enhance the scenario of the Iberian Peninsula. This included an enhancement of the terrain, that was still low detail at the moment the project started, new layouts for many airports and hundreds of objects spread all over the geography.

This custom scenery is no longer available. The publication of the updated FlightGear World Scenery 2.0 made this custom scenery unnecessary, and most buildings were submitted to TerraSync.

Improvements over the standard scenery

The goal of the custom Iberian scenery was to greatly improve the World Scenery 1.0.0 available at the time for the Iberian Peninsula. Specifically:

  • Terrain compiled using the last data available from OpenStreetMap and CORINE.
  • Improvements on the layouts of many airports (LEBL, LEMG etc.), including many new airports (LESL, LECI etc.)
  • Models of lots of buildings, including main airports and some cities: Madrid, Barcelona and many more.
  • Parking positions for many the airports. Currently, about 80% of the airports have parking positions.
  • Scenery especially suitable for VFR flights: Notification points, cities etc.
  • osm2city (real buildings) in Gibraltar (airport: LXGB), Barcelona (airport: LEBL), Pamplona (LEPP) and Bay of Txingudi (airport: LESO-San Sebastian)

Terrain files for the whole Iberian Peninsula are no longer necessary but some minor improvements are not yet in TerraSync: Airports that depend heavily on the elevation (for example, LEPO), airports already sent to the X-Plane community (for example, LEMG or LEST) after the scenery 2.0 was built, hundreds of buildings everywhere we are still uploading to TerraSync and even some non-free buildings and airports such as Ibiza-LEIB or Valencia-LEVC.

Most of the buildings and airports are free and can be downloaded from TerraSync.

Some of the changes that are not yet in Terrasync can be dowloaded from: https://mega.nz/file/0MAQVS5A#NvPp639hXgJj1mtTMAyxVIfjr9Q4Vz5aJGvQ4mVKbdM Unfortunately, the authors of a few of the airports did not release the buildings under an open source license. Hence, consider all buildings and textures in the project as private, and use the versions submitted to TerraSync for your opensource projects.

Improved and new airports

As a result of the project, dozens of airports were modeled. This includes large international airports, such as Madrid (LEMD) and Barcelona (LEBL), medium-size regional airports such as Reus (LERS) or Cordoba (LEBA), small airfields for general aviation such as San Luis (LESL) or Cerdanya (LECD) and tiny airfields for ultralight aircraft, such as Alfés (LEAT)

The map [1] shows the airports developed in the project. All these airports include custom buildings, some of them have enhanced runways and a few are completely new. The improved layout for most of these airports is already included in TerraSync, as well as most of the custom buildings.

Color code of the airport map

  • Blue: International and regional airports, usually controlled. Only airliners and general aviation. No ultralights allowed.
  • Red: Airfields suitable for general aviation, runway longer than 800 m, usually uncontrolled and paved surface. There may be ultralights, gliders and parachutes in the area.
  • Green: Small airfields for ultralights. Usually uncontrolled and dirty surfaces. Runway less than 800 m.
  • Yellow: Heliports.
  • Question mark: We are working on them.

Pre 2.0 scenery

Prior to the release of the 2.0 scenery in TerraSync, we maintained a custom scenery for the continental territories of Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar. The project used the data from CORINE database for the land classes, OpenStreetMap for the landmass and roads and the enhanced altitudes by Jonathan de Ferranti. The scenery files divided the Iberian Peninsula in 10+1 zones for an efficient management of the data and updates.

Zones of the scenery

These files are no longer available, since the current scenario in TerraSync provides a level of detail similar to these old files. More information about these old files can be found at Vive FG!