Lateral

Data Sources & Attribution

Every dataset Lateral uses, who publishes it, under what licence, and how current it is

Obstacle data is a snapshot, not a live feed.

The most recent obstacle data in the shipping app was taken on 28 July 2026. Individual sources are older; each is dated below. Obstacles built since then, and wires moved or removed since then, are not in the app.

Weather, traffic and airspace are fetched live and are not affected.

Obstacles — United States

U.S. Federal Aviation Administration
Digital Obstacle File (DOF)
Taken 28 July 2026 U.S. Government work — public domain
U.S. Department of Homeland Security — HIFLD
Electric Power Transmission Lines
Taken 16 July 2026 U.S. Government open data
U.S. electric utility operators (35)
Pacific Gas & Electric · Southern California Edison · PacifiCorp / Rocky Mountain Power · Pepco Holdings · Xcel Energy Colorado · Avangrid (NYSEG and RG&E) · National Grid (New York and Massachusetts) · Central Hudson · Orange & Rockland · Avista · Minnesota Power · Dominion Energy Virginia · Arizona Public Service · Seattle City Light · Snohomish County PUD · United Illuminating · Rhode Island Energy · Green Mountain Power · Unitil · Hastings Utilities · Orlando Utilities Commission · Tallahassee Utilities · Gulf Coast Electric Cooperative · Garkane Energy · and the municipal utilities of Wauchula, Bastrop, Logan, Springville, Payson, Oak City, Heber, Blanding, Morgan, Kaysville and Hurricane
Overhead electric distribution line and pole GIS layers
Taken 22 July 2026 Retrieved from each operator's public GIS service
Taken between 16 and 22 July 2026 from services each operator publishes openly, without authentication.
Licence as recorded when the data was taken.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company
Overhead distribution and transmission circuits (KML export)
Taken 16 July 2026 Shared with Lateral by PG&E, with permission
Not a public download. Exported from PG&E's internal GIS to Google Earth KML and provided directly. The export carries no wire heights, so these spans alert at any altitude. PG&E's separately published DRP compliance layer is credited above.
Licence as recorded when the data was taken.

Obstacles — France

The three French sources below are published under the Licence Ouverte / Open Licence 2.0, which grants free commercial reuse subject to one condition:

“An acknowledgement of the authorship of the ‘Information’: its source (at least, the name of the ‘Grantor’) and the date of the most recent update of the reused ‘Information’.”
Agence ORE and the French distribution system operators (Enedis and 41 others)
Réseau aérien moyenne tension (HTA)
Publisher's most recent update: 10 June 2026
Medium-voltage overhead distribution spans. Individual spans carry update dates ranging from 9 June 2022 to 10 June 2026; the publisher date shown is the most recent of them.
RTE — Réseau de Transport d'Électricité
Lignes aériennes RTE
Service de l'Information Aéronautique (SIA), DGAC
Obstacles à la Navigation Aérienne (ONA)

Obstacles — rest of world

Federal Office of Civil Aviation FOCA (BAZL)
Swiss air navigation obstacle data
Published by the Swiss federal geodata infrastructure, whose terms of use require that the source be cited.
Licence as recorded when the data was taken.
Austro Control GmbH
ICAO Annex 15 Area 1 obstacle data set
Obtained through an Austro Control account, under the terms attached to that download.
Licence as recorded when the data was taken.
Land Tirol — tiris
Flughindernisse
Licence as recorded when the data was taken.
Natural Resources Canada
CanVec — Topographic Data of Canada
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.
© Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2026
National Electricity Infrastructure — transmission lines, power stations and substations
Transmission lines taken 8 July 2026; power stations and substations 9 July 2026.
Australian Communications and Media Authority
Register of Radiocommunications Licences (RRL)
Taken 8 July 2026 ACMA Register terms of use ↗
The Register's terms, as recorded when the data was taken, permit incorporation into a software product and distribution to third parties.
Licence as recorded when the data was taken.

Obstacles — crowd-sourced and pilot-reported

© OpenStreetMap contributors
OpenStreetMap — obstacles, wind turbines, helipads and airport surfaces
Fetched live and, for airport surfaces, also served from our own backend.
Lateral pilots
Pilot-reported obstacles
Live Contributed to Lateral by the reporting pilot

Airspace, airports, terrain and weather

openAIP
Airspace (United States and Australia)
OurAirports and its contributors
Airports, runways and radio frequencies
A community-maintained dataset, credited at the publisher's request rather than as a licence condition. FAA heliport contact details come from NASR instead.
Licence as recorded when the data was taken.
U.S. Federal Aviation Administration
National Airspace System Resource (NASR) subscription — heliports and fixes
Taken 29 July 2026 U.S. Government work — public domain
Publisher's most recent update: 9 July 2026
FAA 28-day subscription, edition of 9 July 2026. Heliport contact details taken 23 July 2026; navigation fixes 29 July 2026.
U.S. Federal Aviation Administration
VFR sectional charts and the Chart Supplement
Taken 6 August 2026 U.S. Government work — public domain
Publisher's most recent update: 9 July 2026
Not a live feed. Sectional tiles were built on 6 August 2026 and cover the Seattle sheet only. The Chart Supplement is the 9 July 2026 edition, which the FAA supersedes on 3 September 2026.
AWS Terrain Tiles and its contributing agencies
Terrain elevation grid
Assembled from many national elevation datasets, each with its own attribution; the contributing agencies are listed at the source link.
Licence as recorded when the data was taken.
NOAA / National Weather Service and the FAA Aviation Weather Center
METAR, TAF, PIREP, SIGMET, G-AIRMET and radar
Live U.S. Government work — public domain