Flying

Exploring airship hangars in Google Earth

April 17, 2014

We’ve shared a lot of articles from Google Sightseeing over the years. They do a great job of choosing an interesting topic and then digging in deep. Their recent article from Ian Brown on the subject of Airship Hangars is no different.

Hundreds of hangars were building airships in the last century, though most of them are gone now. The earliest building, Hangar Y at Chalais Meudon outside Paris, is not only intact but is actually in 3D in Google Earth:

Here is Ian’s take on Hangar Y:

Hangar Y was built in 1879 on what was then a military base. It is 70m long, 24m wide and 20m high (230′ x 78′ x 65′), although additional structures have since been added on both sides. It was originally a pavilion at the Paris exhibition, but was moved to house the airship La France. It later served for several decades as a museum and was used by painter Marc Chagall when he was working on large ceiling panels for an opera house.

The article goes into great detail about many of the hangars around the world, and I encourage you to read the full entry. In addition, as they usually do, they’ve also release a KML file to help you follow along.

Great work, Ian!

Mapping Flight MH370 in Google Earth

March 17, 2014

As the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 continues to baffle those searching for it, tools such as this crowdsourced effort to scour satellite imagery are helping in the effort.

Along those lines, Stefan Geens at Ogle Earth has put together some impressive maps to try to narrow down where the flight may have ended up.

Through a combination of information from the Malaysian government, satellite data from Wikipedia, Malaysian military radar data, SkyVector and other sources, he’s put together an impressive KMZ file that helps compile all of that data into a single location. You can read more about Stefan’s work over on the Ogle Earth blog.

Taking it further, Keir Clarke at Google Maps Mania points us to an interesting map from CBC News that showcases dozens of planes that have gone missing without a trace in the past 50 years. As rare as events such as flight MH370 are, they’re certainly not unheard of.

Animating a model aircraft along a spline curve

January 29, 2014

Around a year ago Paul van Dinther shared a cubic spline curve that identified a path through the Grand Canyon.

Colin Hazlehurst (who has created items such as Captain James Cook’s exploration of Australia) was working on software to animate model aircraft in Google Earth and thought it would be an interesting exercise to make his Spirit of St Louis model fly along Paul’s curve.

This KMZ file shows this in action, and illustrates the following (in Colin’s words):

The model moves in turn to each set of coordinates (longitude, latitude, and altitude) defining the LineString. The duration of each AnimatedUpdate is determined by calculating the distance between points and dividing this by the pre-set speed of the model.
The roll and tilt of the model are calculated from the changes in heading and altitude respectively between successive pairs of coordinates.
A Camera ‘follows’ the model with a pre-determined offset, defined in terms of heading, range, and tilt relative to the model. These values identify the location of the Camera, but the Camera also has a tilt setting which varies according to the pitch of the model; if the model is climbing, the camera tilt is reduced; if the model is descending the camera tilt is increased. This has worked fairly well in this instance, but I notice that at one point the Camera bounces off the wall of the canyon. This might happen when you view the kmz, and I would suggest trying different aspect ratios (width to height) of the Google Earth window.

I thought at first it wouldn’t look right to fly a model aircraft along a spline curve; it didn’t seem to be the way that aircraft flew. I realise now that this was because my first experiments drew splines on too large a scale, with many miles between interpolation points. Paul’s curve is on a much smaller scale, making for correspondingly small adjustments to the flightpath.

Along with the file above, you can also watch this YouTube video to see it in action. Nice work, Colin!

All of the views from the “Gravity” movie in Google Earth

January 27, 2014

Over the years we’ve shown you many great articles from Stefan Geens at OgleEarth. He’s shared geotagged hiking trips, the destruction of the city of Kashgar, the path of the Chelyabinsk meteor, imagery of Osama bin Laden’s compound, and much more.

Now he’s back with an amazing post that maps out all of the views from the motion picture “Gravity” onto Google Earth.

He’s taken 62 screenshots from the movie and compiled them all into this 8.8MB KMZ file for you to use in Google Earth. Here are a few of his thoughts on it:

Gravity‘s daytime Earth is a highly accurate rendering. I was in almost all cases able to get a perfect match, not just for coastlines, but also for geographic features such as lakes, mountain ranges and forests. … The rendering of Earth at night is geographically just as accurate, but city lights and lit roads are impressionistic rather than realistic.

…

Here’s how I made that KMZ file: The biggest clue to getting an accurate placement for the screenshots in Google Earth is the film’s opening line of text: “At 600km above Planet Earth…” This was a great help, for fixing the viewpoint above Earth at this height proved to be accurate and removed a major variable from the process. Another big clue was the Earth’s curved horizon in a screenshot. Matching the horizon removed two more degrees of freedom (tilt and field of view), leaving only a horizontal plane across which to match the angles of the landscape.

Stefan put an amazing amount of work into tracking down all of these views, and the result is stunning. His post goes into much greater detail about the process and shows off many more the photos, and we highly recommend you go check it out for yourself.

Great work Stefan!

The flight of Asiana #214 in Google Earth

December 30, 2013

Back in July, Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash landed on final approach to San Francisco International Airport. While three were killed in the crash, the other 304 passengers thankfully survived. The folks at Flightradar24 have taken the data from the plane’s transponder and analyzed the final 2-1/2 minutes of data from it.

In their words:

We have analyzed the last 150 seconds of data from flight ‎#OZ214. It looks like the ADS-B transponder continued to transmit data for about 10 seconds after the first impact. You can also see that the altitude increased after the first impact, when the aircraft bounced up in the air. The ground speed in the last seconds of the flight was only 112 knots.

Updpate: Sent in by a GEB reader, you can also download this KMZ file that adds the “ideal flight path” to the file and tweaked the track so that viewers can ‘fly’ along both flight paths using the Touring feature of Google Earth.