The amazing things about Google Earth
For aviation buffs, people fascinated with interesting pictures, or those who like to find neat objects in GE here is a nice collection of photos of airplanes captured in flight 
. Someone known as “AZTraveller” at the Google Earth Community has been collecting all the posted Placemarks of planes in flight and he periodically updates his collection as seen here. He has collected approximately 75 planes so far.
[Read more…] about Planes in Flight Captured in Google Earth
[UPDATE 5-September-2007: Check out Google Earth 4.2’s new built-in flight simulator]
Imagine running Microsoft Flight Simulator and Google Earth together. Imagine seeing your simulated plane, and other auto-generated planes, appear within the Google Earth. Turn on the roads layer, the airport layer, etc. and you can see all kinds of data associated with where you are flying that the Flight Simulator does not.
These are just the simple by-products of a free application announced in July by Juergen Haible (http://www.elbiah.de/). His application is called MyFSGoogleEarth and you can find it, along with instructions for installing it here. This is a program for the more serious Flight Sim user and requires at least the free version of FSUIPC.
As Google Earth becomes even more useful (in terms of data and interface), I expect there will be even better interfaces between GE and MS Flight Simulator in the future (despite the rivalry between Google and Microsoft). Great job Juergen!
As a pilot I have used GPS for navigation in my plane since 1998 (starting with a Garmin GPS195). During the last year, I discovered you can use tools to document your flight by saving your GPS flight log to your computer. One tool I found particularly nice is called GPS Visualizer (at www.gpsvisualizer.com). The picture at the right (click the picture to see larger) is an example of a flight I made shown in GPSVisualizer. The color of the track represents altitude.
I’ve shared GPSVisualizer’s capabilities with other pilots (oh, it’s also good for all kinds of other GPS activities by the way), but after seeing Google Earth I immediately wanted to try my flight tracks in it as well.