Hi,

My son just returned from leading a ski tour from Great Falls, MT, to Switzerland, which he does as a hobby. There were over 110 people on the tour and Great Falls airport couldn't handle them all at once, causing some of them to drive to places like Helena and Kalispell to catch feeder flights to Salt Lake City, the nearest hub. From Salt Lake they flew to Atlanta where all of them boarded a Delta flight to Zurich.

The plan was so diversified that I decided to "track" their progress on the web. I searched for the Atlanta - Zurich flight and got 3 different sites that gave information, Travelocity, Expedia, and FBOweb. FBOweb had a banner saying that they had some really interesting ways of using Google Earth including tracking flights in progress. I clicked on that option and there was an icon representing the flight, at that moment 500 miles due East of Boston headed for Zurich.

Another interesting application shows the activity around the 10 busiest US airports. On Google Earth it looks like bees flying around a bee hive.
But within limits you can actually watch the flights complete with numbers making their approaches to JFK and other major airports.

Check it out.

Wow, thats crazy and actually kind of scary in a way.

http://www.fboweb.com/antest/ge/intro.aspx

That's wild.

b_a88 wrote:

Wow, thats crazy and actually kind of scary in a way.

Not really; it's not good enough to use for targeting information presuming that was your concern. However, you can zero in on the icon and see it's alleged position at the bottom of the screen.

If you're concerned about all the traffic around major airports, that's scary even when you know what they're supposed to be doing. I compare it to juggling; if you get enough balls in the air at once, sooner or later you'll drop one.

But the biggest problem in that respect is that we tend to take flying for granted and become complacent about it. In reality you can't walk home from a flight if something goes wrong. Even the flight crews, numbed by hundreds of hours of boredom, sometimes lose focus.

Someone described flying as 99% boredom and 1% stark terror. No truer words were spoken, imho.

I love Google Earth; will we ever have geographic challenges again?

Wow this is a fantastic innovation. A few years ago we would never have dreamed we could sit at home and do this. Kudos once more to Google.