Memorial to UTA Flight 772 Visible from Space

(En Español) – GoogleSightseeing.com has written an excellent post about a unique memorial to UTA Flight 772 in the desert of Niger. This tragic flight ended when a briefcase bomb exploded while the DC-10 was enroute to Paris back in 1989. The bomb was placed by Libyan terrorists. In 2007, some family members of the 170 fatalities went out to the crash site and created a huge memorial made out of dark stones placed in the sand. The memorial shows a silhouette of a DC-10 seen from above. Amazingly, a 2007 GeoEye satellite photo shows the memorial shortly after it was finished in Google Earth. Now millions of people can see the memorial for the first time. See the location here now visible in Google Earth.

The families also took one of the wings and placed it vertically in the sand with a plaque listing the names of the deceased on the side. You can see this part of the memorial in a Panoramio photo which appears at the site if you turn on the “Geographic Web->Panoramio” layer as seen here (click the photo for larger version):

Make sure to read GoogleSightseeing’s post which has more details and links. Not only that, but one of the family members of the crash victims has left comments about how wonderful it is for them to see the memorial is now visible in Google Earth.