I just discovered that the Paragliding Forum has added Google Earth support to its database called “Leonardo ” which allows people who record their Paragliding/Glider flights with GPS technology to submit and share their flights. The picture here shows a flight
near Portinho da Arrabida, Portugal.
You can see the list of flights in the Leonardo logbook here. After you bring up the list, simply click on the Google Earth icons in the far right column under “Display” and you will bring up each track. By the way, when I say “huge”, we’re talking about 791 currently displayed flight logs from all over the world. Amazing!
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
I don’t understand why websites do not use more widely Google Maps as a selection interface for downloading KML.
Even if it is not as smart as a live KML, it allows the user to see quickly the data without loading anything else than the browser (great for Linux/Mac users too).
You can see something like that on my website (GPS MTB paths), but it doesn’t create KML natively, only GPX.
Catching up (again)
I’m back from a week in the greatest city in the world, and it’s time to catch up re Google Earth: Mark McLaren looks at an implementation of XSLT to transform GPX into KML, and then updates his own conversion…
There are several sites listed in my articles using a Google Maps interface with a Google Earth file as an option.
By the way, you can import your GPX files into Google Earth and save them as KML as one way to convert the files (if you don’t have too many).
http://www.paragliding365.com might be of interest here, too. GE is also supported. the database containts more than 4000 paragliding spots all around the world. users can post/download flights for their favorite spots. the online contest flights (www.online-contest.org) of the year 2003 are also available as kml downloads.
i think most of the page is german. but there might be a language switch for the menus.
i have also managed to make a top fifty selection of the best cross country flights for some locations and have merged them into kmz files.
here is one example for fiesch, a famous paragliding spot in switzerland:
http://www.wurznsepp.com/download/download.php?filename=fiesch_2003_top50.kmz
highly recommended for spotting the best thermal sources there…
(more @ http://www.wurznsepp.com -> paragliding)
by the way: GEB = great!