Canary Islands Custom Scenery
The Canary Islands Custom Scenery project is an ambitious project of pilots, developers and supporters of the Canary Islands region. Its aim is to provide the region in a scenery quality as high and as detailed as possible. Other branches of this project take care about a more realistic local AI traffic, multiplayer events and local airlines.
The project is currently under development, with an increasing number of contributors and steady updated contents.
History
The whole project started in June 2016, when passionate developers and former residents of the archipelago started several threads in the FlightGear-Forum. Scenery and model developers started to work on the textures, as well as on the terrain, the objects, the sea traffic and obviously on the airports. Within hours and days, a whole re-texturing of all seven major islands took place. Soon after that, the first 3D models for local urban areas were published and shared, and airports had been developed. Developers who had worked on one or two islands before, now shared their experiences and work with others. By now, the development is going on, already having several islands and airports modeled, but there is still a lot of work to do...
Area description
The Canary Islands are an archipelago in the east Atlantic, off the coast of Morocco. While geographically belonging to Africa, their political status is that of an autonomous region of Spain.
Being called the "Islands of eternal spring", their climate is mostly warm, with an average temperature of 25°C. This makes all seven Islands perfect for tourism, so that this is the region's main income. Because of this very high tourist level, there are airports on all islands. Except for the airport of El Hierro (GCHI), every island has an international airport. The weather is excellent for flying nearly all the time, some winds could make it a challenge, especially in smaller planes. Aside from general air traffic, there are many touristic flights from central Europe, mostly from the Uk and Germany. Connections to the spanish mainland are provided by Vueling and Iberia.
Very interesting is the regional carrier sector, operated by the Canarian regional airline Binter Canarias.
Why fly to the Canary Islands?
Having eight regional and international airports in such a small region is a very big advantage. This makes it very easy for pilots to improve their skills, especially takeoffs, approaches and landings.
The nicely-modeled scenery is worth a special look, so you really can enjoy your flight. A whole lot of people had visited the Islands for their holiday, so now you are able to really get that holiday feeling, when touching down at one of the nicely modeled airports. The airports themselves are very different in style, conception, use and their level of difficulty. From the international airport of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where you can easily perform a landing with a 747 or A380 to the small one of El Hierro, where it can be difficult to have a touch down even with small regional turboprops, or the notorious Tenerife Norte - Los Rodeos, there are sites for every kind of aviator.
Development
This custom scenery is currently under development. We are still working on the project, making it better and more realistic. It's not planned to publish it via TerraSync by now, maybe we are going to do that later. Actual and updated versions are accessible via https://github.com/legoboyvdlp/Canarys.
In March, 5 2017, building and roads have been added from OpenStreetMap using Osm2city.py. See May 2017 Newsletter and forum topic
A custom scenary zip can ben downloaded here.
Status of the Project
The whole region is re-textured according to the actual vegetation and look.
You can see the airport development in the list below:
| Airport | Airport layout | Airport buildings and furniture |
|---|---|---|
| GCRR | YES | NOT YET |
| CGFV | YES | NOT YET |
| GCLP | YES | YES |
| GCTS | YES | NOT YET |
| GCXO | YES | YES |
| GCGM | YES | YES |
| GCLA | YES | YES |
| GCHI | YES | YES |
Things to contribute to
The following things need to be added or improved. Your help is appreciated! If you want to take care of one of the listed topics below, please leave a comment in the forum: https://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=29773
This avoids double processing, and gives us a notice what we can expect in the near term.
- Airport buildings and furniture for GCFV (Fuerteventura)
- Airport buildings and furniture for GCRR (Lanzarote)
- Airport buildings and furniture for GCTS (Tenerife Sur)
- regional AI Traffic (Binter Canarias Airline)
- Contributors to multiplayer events