Pittsburgh FAA Visualization

The Pittsburgh Airport visualization was generated to illustrate airport data compiled and distributed by the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) for approximately 100 major airports across the United States. This visualization can be exported into situation assessment and real-time monitoring systems because it contains highly accurate ground positions of airport data elements.

The FAA source data contains a collection of shapefiles for runway and taxiway features, buildings, and storage tanks, as well as a high-resolution true color orthophoto of the airport and its immediate surroundings. Using USGS DEMs for elevation, the FAA data was quickly converted into a realistic and accurate 3D visualization in TerraTools. To increase realism in the visualization, additional features such as tree canopies, light points, and tree models were added using TEdit, the feature editor in TerraTools.

TerraTools unique project flow graph approach to visual database construction allows for the reuse of this project graph for generation of any of the FAA airfield datasets by simply switching in the appropriate source data. This flexibility is useful in cases where many datasets are collected for a common data content model.

Click here to see a fly-through of the Pittsburgh FAA database.

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