Recently, I’ve been exploring the capabilities of a program called Google Earth. This is a system put together by the Internet giant Google, who are well known for their Internet search engine. Google Earth is a photographic map of the entire world. Yes! The ENTIRE world. Some is in wonderful detail, but much of the Earth is still only available at low resolution.
The way that it works is that you download the Google Earth program from http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html and install it on your computer. Versions are available for PC, Mac, and Linux. This is a 10MB download; if that’s daunting then I’m happy to give you a copy on CDROM. You run the installation package on your computer, and then run the program. You can now navigate round the Earth using your mouse to drag the globe round, and to zoom in and out.
Where this gets useful is looking at airfields or airstrips you plan to visit. For example, let’s zoom in on Peter Kernohan’s place. (I’ve cut down the size of the images so that this page won’t take all night if you're on dial-up. These images are somewhat worse than what you actually see in Google Earth… )
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You can view from as far away as you like, looking at the whole of NZ, or even the whole Earth, in one image. But I've skipped that and started with an image of the whole Manawatu/Horowhenua region. Notice it has Ohakea labelled near the top, and my label of Peter Kernohan's place near the bottom. You can clearly see the Rangitikei river. Foxpine's label would show up if we zoomed in a bit on the appropriate part. Also, if you look closely, you can see that the image is made up of several photos stitched together. The clouds in the lower right corner are obviously on a different photo from the rest. Less obvious is that the top half is somewhat lower quality than the bottom left corner. |
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This is about the bottom quarter of the first image, zoomed in about four times as close. The right edge of this one is the left edge of the cloudy part of the image above. |
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Zoomed in about twice as close again. The large triangular object in this and the previous image is some kind of image-stitching artifact. |
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About twice as close again. Peter's strip is barely visible across the lower middle of the image. |
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And again twice as close. The strip is now clear. Lower right you can see his house and aircraft. |
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This is as close as you can get (at the moment) for the area around Peter’s house. Thankfully, no-one was out nude sunbathing that day! |
OK, enough of Peter's place.
These next two screenshots illustrate a couple of Google Earth's problems.
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The high-resolution (i.e. good quality) coverage is patchy… This image is of Taonui airfield. If you know it’s there, you can pick out the road and railway running diagonally top-left to bottom-right, the hangars, and the seal strip. But it’s not really useful to aviators at all. Those white areas are clouds, and the dark areas are shadows of those clouds. |
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Here's a fine, high-quality image of Neil Colliver's strip location. But where are the house, hangar, and airstrip? They're all missing, because this photo is at least a couple of years old. |
The last issue with Google Earth is that it has to download these images from their servers as you navigate. So (obviously) you need an Internet connection. In fact, you really need a fast connection, because there's a lot of photos to download. You may find it a bit frustrating if you’re on a dial-up connection. And if you do have broadband, you’ll find that Google Earth can quickly use up your monthly high-speed allocation.
Google Earth allows you to create Placemarks to remember places of interest (e.g. airstrips). These are the little orange drawing pin and other symbols on the pictures, and Google encourage people to share their Placemarks. They have a community website for this purpose.... http://bbs.keyhole.com I’ve uploaded a list of NZ GA airfields there, plus a few strips that I know the location of. I'll also make this file available via the MMC website. If anyone has a strip that they would like added to the list, I’m happy to do that. Email me (frankvdh (at) xtra.co.nz) with the latitude & longitude of the strip, and any special details (e.g. runway direction and length, phone number for permission to land) and that information will be added to the Placemark.
As well as Placemarks, you can also add things to the map. Firstly, it’s possible to add an overlay over the images. Google Earth provides terrain, roads, railways, etc, although these tend to be quite inaccurate. But all the VFG airfield diagrams could be added as overlays. Individuals can also create 3D objects to add to the map, so for example it would be possible to add the NZ airspace to it. Google Earth allows you to look at the map obliquely as well as straight down, so it would be possible to visualise the airspace in 3 dimensions. This could make for a nice training aid.
| Finally, here’s a really neat thing… Google Earth’s images are mostly satellite images, so there are quite a few interesting events that have been captured. One hobby that has evolved has been finding aircraft in flight… there are thousands recorded. Below is the best of this collection… the Lancaster bomber of the RAF Battle of Britain Flight in flight over Huntingdon in the UK. |  |