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March 13, 2007
Nine Planes in Formation - Faked in the Google Earth Database!
[NOTE: Google removed the faked formation and just left the one real plane captured in the photo. The image was replaced during the image update on March 29th.]
What started out looking like a pretty cool find of nine small planes in flight in near-perfect formation, was quickly determined to be a fake. At a lake about 35 km west of Copenhagen, someone photoshopped this formation of what is apparently a single plane before the photos were supplied to Google. So, anyone can see the faked formation (at least until Google removes them). See the planes here in Google Earth 
, or here in Google Maps. If you look closely at the aerial photo you can easily see that the water around each plane is identical. It only took a couple of hours from the time someone posted the exciting find, for experienced GEC moderator 'Hill' to recognize it was fake and point it out.
You can read the two nearly simultaneous threads of discussion here and here. Interesting to note that just to the southwest of the planes on the same lake is a large number "2" in orange. This looks like part of a number from a camera which took the aerial photograph, but wasn't properly edited out. When you have millions of photos from many suppliers, interesting things happen to the imagery. I kind of like the planes... Hopefully Google will keep them around a while. Thanks to 'Delta102' for the tip.
For more interesting things found in the Google Earth imagery - which some people consider data errors, but others find entertaining - check out this article on the Data Error Compendium.
Posted by FrankTaylor at March 13, 2007 08:05 AM
Comments
Posted by: Darren Cope at March 13, 2007 04:11 PM
Find the original plane.
Posted by: Bram Versteeve at March 16, 2007 02:49 AM
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It may be another case of a "copyright trap" that the image provider added to the image. This way, they can tell if someone other than the licensed user (Google in this case) is using the same data. There was a discussion about "made up roads" in the commercial road networks that serves the same purpose.