Flying

It is becoming something of a passion for some, looking at the high resolution satellite and aerial photography to find a shot of an aircraft in flight somewhere on the Earth. As previously reported here and here people at the Google Earth Community have been collecting the locations of pictures of planes captured in flight in the Google Earth data.
The folks at the GEC have been creating a database which is being updated daily, and until recently you had to go to the main post and re-download the KMZ file to get the latest updates. Now, my friend Valery up in Russia has created a network link for the plane collections including the airplanes in flights, airports, locations of DC3s, and locations of Starships. He has also put train/rail-related collections as well. Once you download the network link, move it to your “My Places” folder for safe keeping. Then, click on the “Transportation” folder to see what it contains. Click on the folder you want to examine and explore. I recommend the “Air->All Aircraft in Flight”. You will be amazed at the dozens of planes in flight people have found. Double click on the placemarks to get a close-up view of these planes.
One thing you may notice is that some of the planes have a “ghost”. This is not a shadow, but is in fact an artifact of satellite imagery and the fact that planes are in motion. You can read an explanation here. A tip: when you are done looking at all the placemarks you can select the main folder with the right mouse button and choose “Hide Contents” to deselect all the placemarks. Then click on the folder “triangle” to open/close the folder.

The DC-3 was first built in 1935, and the first commercial airline, American Airlines, flew it in 1936. Just over 10,000 DC-3s were built, and over 1,000 of them are still flying today. They have been used for the military, commercial airlines, skydiving clubs, and pretty much every other imaginable flying use. They are beloved by many in the aviation world.
In the Google Earth Community, one of the DC-3s biggest fans is someone called “Hill”. Hill has been collecting the locations of DC-3s , and documenting them with placemarks. With the help of many other people in his forum thread, they have found over 250 so far. I encourage you to look at his forum thread as he has some background information and links to DC-3 related web sites. One of the best links I looked at was the DC-3 Hangar.
Once you download the GE File above, it is very interesting to double click on the placemarks and witness the location of these planes. Some are just hulks stored off the airport, sometimes with entire forests grown up around them. Others are still on the tarmac, obviously ready to fly. And, the locations are all over the world. The DC-3 is easy to recognize, so it can be fun to look for. This is an admirable collection. Good work Hill!

When I first heard about someone using Google Maps, and later Google Earth, to show UFO sighting locations it seemed a bit silly. But, after viewing the Google Earth file , which breaks up the sightings according to the year it was taken, the application took on a different perspective. Note, this data is only for the United States (where most UFOs appear of course).
After loading into GE, look at the Places window and view the contents of the “UFO Sightings” folder. You can turn on the placemarks for each year in the database from 1860 through 2005. What I find interesting is the density of reportings over the years. There’s a huge increase in reports starting in 1995. It could be that once the Internet took off in 1995, it enabled more people to communicate their speculations. But, I wonder whether this says something about the sanity of our society over time?
At one point…

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