Case Study: CAE achieves rapid, realistic global night-scene road lighting for flight simulators with Safe Software's FME

CAE - Customer Case Study

CAE, founded in Canada in 1947, is the world’s largest flight simulator provider, training 100,000 pilots and crew annually and generating $2.1B in revenue. The company’s GIS team of four needed to produce global lightmap overlays for realistic night-scene simulation in civil aviation training, but the previous manual process was time-consuming, produced randomized lighting, and could not meet the project’s six-week deadline.

Using FME Desktop, CAE built an automated workspace to clip OpenStreetMap roads to DMSP-OLS Nighttime Lights illumination zones, populate points along roads, convert to raster, process with ImageMagick, restore georeferencing, and combine tiles. The automated FME workflow met the schedule, increased output accuracy—producing realistic city night views and correctly lit roads suitable for navigation—and replaced an impractical manual approach.

CAE

Joanna Hobbins

CAE