Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Flight Plans

As I plan my summer vacation, I've begun to wonder where my flights might put me as I fly to my destinations. Will I fly over the Grand Canyon? Yosemite? Nebraska? Assuming that my flights proceed in a more a less direct line, I could make a good guess using Google Earth.

Using the measure tool, I drew a line between destination points, which allowed me to see the approximate path of the flight and of course the distance. You can create multiple destinations using the path tool, but you won't see distance.

It is neat to see where your flight might go. For example, a straight line flight between Seattle and Tokyo will take you over the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. This seems counterintuitive until you look at the globe as a three dimensional sphere as it is displayed in Google Earth.

1 comment:

Jim Dornberg said...

You can view your actual flight path on the fboweb.com website. Just look for the GE icon. Here's a link to a screenshot my son took of our flight to San Francisco. We were flying over Alcatraz and the bridges. http://bp0.blogger.com/__NHQu2lfc74/R5Y8Rt-auuI/AAAAAAAAAEo/2Z_2U35huCk/s1600-h/10.jpg