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The flight of Asiana #214 in Google Earth

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.

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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.

You can read more about it on this Google+ post, or grab the KML file to view it directly in Google Earth.

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.

Plane wrecks in Google Earth

We recently showed you a great collection sunken ships from MyReadingMapped, but we can’t skip their earlier excellent post that tracked down plane wrecks around the world.

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Their site focuses on commercial airline crashes, as there are plenty to cover.  Over the years, he’s complied a list of interesting facts about airplane crash sites, including how he finds the locations as well as some interesting stories behind some of the crashes.

You can see the full list of locations on his site here, or grab this KML file to view them in Google Earth.  You can also check out the Airplane crash sites section on Google Earth Hacks or the Transportation forum in the Google Earth Community to find more.