Provenance · licences · thanks
The Saint-Barthélemy you fly is not an artist's impression. It is the French national survey: a lidar campaign flown over the island in March 2019 by the hydrographers of the Shom and the mapmakers of the IGN, published openly so that anyone — including a flight simulator — can build on it. This page credits every dataset, its edition, and every piece of open-source code we ship, in full.
All French public geodata below is used under the Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0, which requires naming the producer and the date of the last update — an obligation we are glad to meet, because which national survey flew the lidar is exactly the kind of thing this product wants you to know. The simulator is built in waves: the terrain below is already under your wings; the imagery and offshore bathymetry land with the texturing and ocean builds.
Terrain — the island itself
Terrain: IGN — RGE ALTI® 1 m, éd. 2019-11-25, Licence Ouverte 2.0
A one-metre digital terrain model of département 977 (Saint-Barthélemy) by the Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière. The island was flown in March 2019 with a HawkEye 4X topo-bathymetric lidar in a joint Shom–IGN campaign — vertical accuracy in the 0.2 m class on land. Every ridge on the approach over the Col de la Tourmente, including the col itself, comes from this survey.
Imagery — what the ground looks like
Imagery: IGN — BD ORTHO® 20 cm, éd. 2021, Licence Ouverte 2.0
The IGN's 20 cm orthophotography of Saint-Barthélemy, 2021 edition. We re-tile, resample and tone-map it for the renderer; under Licence Ouverte 2.0 the credit above survives all of that reprocessing, so here it is.
Buildings, roads & coastline
Vectors: IGN — BD TOPO®, éd. 2026-06-15, Licence Ouverte 2.0
The IGN's topographic vector database for département 977, quarterly edition of 15 June 2026 — 8,540 building footprints with measured heights, the road network, the airport surfaces and the coastline.
Nearshore bathymetry — the water you flare over
Bathymetry: Shom — Litto3D® Saint-Barthélemy 2019, Licence Ouverte 2.0
The land–sea lidar model by the Shom, France's hydrographic office, from the same March 2019 campaign as the terrain — which is why the reef shallows of the Baie de Saint-Jean line up exactly with the runway threshold. Not to be used for navigation; we fly over it, not on it.
Required citation: Shom-IGN, 2019. dx.doi.org/10.17183/L3D_SAINT_BARTHELEMY_2019
Offshore bathymetry — beyond the lidar
Bathymetry: GEBCO — GEBCO 2026 Grid, éd. 2026-04-23, public domain
Beyond the Litto3D envelope, the seabed comes from the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, the global 15-arc-second grid published 23 April 2026 and placed in the public domain.
Requested citation: GEBCO Bathymetric Compilation Group 2026, doi:10.5285/4f68d5c7-45eb-f999-e063-7086abc036fa
The Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0 (Etalab) grants a non-exclusive, free, worldwide right to reuse the data, commercially or not, including inside a product like this one. In return it requires crediting the producer and the date of the last update — and that obligation follows the data through reprocessing, so it applies to our derivatives too. There is no share-alike clause.
Données modifiées / modified data: we reproject everything into a local frame anchored on the TFFJ runway 10 threshold, resample the terrain to 1 m / 4 m / 8 m grids, quantise heights to 16-bit, extrude the building footprints, and re-tile and tone-map the imagery. None of that changes who measured the island, or when.
The numbers the missions grade you against are published ones, not invented ones.
Shipped inside BLACKBOX under the licence terms of each project. Full licence texts travel with the vendored files in the repository.
Consolidated geodata credit, for reuse in one line:
Géodonnées : IGN (RGE ALTI®, BD ORTHO®, BD TOPO®, Licence
Ouverte 2.0, éd. 2019–2026) ; Shom-IGN, 2019,
dx.doi.org/10.17183/L3D_SAINT_BARTHELEMY_2019 ; GEBCO 2026
doi:10.5285/4f68d5c7-45eb-f999-e063-7086abc036fa.