Google Earth amazes me!

[englishal]

Google earth showing 3D UK airspace, Notams, CAA digital chart (overlayed by me, so it is not perfect ;)), GPS waypoints and airfields. I wonder how long it will be before someone bases an in flight GPS on the GE engine which can give proper 3D terrain avoidance, satellite quality photos, airspace, CAA charts......now wouldn't that be something.....
Someone else created the airspace, I found a little program called AIS2KML which imports the AIS notam briefing and creates a KML file to display the notams, and I imported the waypoints from the FAA dB........
Cool....;)
http://www.digital-reality.co.uk/ge2.jpg

[172driver]

Impressive! But how did you get it to display the airspace ??? Don't seem to be able to do that (may have to do with the fact that I'm on the Mac version) :(

[englishal]

some clever fella has created a KML file with the airspace objects. There is airspace for many different countries now....

http://www.lloydbailey.net/airspace.html

[Maxflyer]

I just upgraded to the latest version and it is slower than my granny and she died ten years ago! I also can't find how to sroll the image into a sectional view?

[172driver]

WOW :D :D :D :D

Downloaded it now - this is absolutely incredible !

englishal - cheers for finding this :ok:

[IO540]

I don't wish to pour cold water on what looks really amazing, but is this actually useful?

For example, how reliable are the airspace depictions, or anything else for that matter?

[172driver]

IO, what's happening ? Recently coming out against the G1000, now questioning this nifty bit of software..... you didn't go out and buy an open-cockpit taildragger and a leather helmet, did you ?? ;)

[IO540]

:O :O

The question stands ;)

Seriously, of somebody could rip off the GE 3D data, stick it on a flash card, and program a PDA to provide a GPWS product, that would sell.

I suggested something similar to the Oziexplorer developer but I think everybody is scared of getting sued, and also the GE data is copyright (as is Nasa World Wind; a very similar product).

[Andy_RR]

IO540 - it's free, therefore it doesn't have to be 'useful'!

Is this the harbinger of NOTAMs to come though? AIS could publish NOTAMS as an official .kml file to download. Then you could fly your route to check anything relevant!

Nice one englishal, but how did you get the CAA charts on there? I'm assuming one could scan a 1/2 mill chart by hand, but how do you get the image data onto the correct spot in GE?

A

[IO540]

I know this is going over ground which has been done to death many times, but such .kml file generation will be prone to the same problems which any of the other notam plotting programs suffer from: typos in coordinate lists, etc.

I agree it's a giant step forward in presentation though; worth investigating.

But the bottom line is that unless somebody is paid to generate the airspace etc data, and check it regularly against the national AIPs, the stuff might be accurate for commonly flown areas but will be pretty useless for anywhere else. This is "life", I am afraid.

I played with Nasa World Wind a while ago (a very similar product to Google Earth, using much the same data as far as I can tell) and for example someone generated an overlay showing all the world's airways. Very interesting but unless updated (airways, navaids, etc) it is almost totally useless. Some of the updating can be done automatically (e.g. one can generate a report of VORs and DMEs from the Eurocontrol EAD website) but the rest of the stuff is plain donkey work.

Old (2004) CAA charts are fairly freely circulating as a TIFF. I saw some on ED2K (Emule). There is also a way to convert the current ones: basically, you have to buy the Memory Map set (£150 for the three UK charts) and print from MM using a special print driver that generates a TIFF file. Such print drivers are open source, I believe.

I wouldn't hold out much hope for getting notams presented like this, on top of a CAA base map. The various parties involved would be immediately bogged down in map copyright issues. This is Europe, after all.

If plane spotters put as much effort into generating maps as they apparently spend collecting tail numbers, airframe serial numbers, and collating all this on websites, we would have free aviation charts for the whole world by now :)

[Mike Cross]

The problem with graphical depiction of NOTAM is how you deal with stuff that is not a point.

The example shown is the Kingsclere Obstruction light u/s (how many months does it take to change a light bulb?) which works quite well on a graphical description.

How though do you depict something like a fast jet exercise, covering a large area, where the centre of the area is outside of your view? How would you show, in a picture of West Wales, that the Lands End VOR is u/s? How do you show a temporary change to a LARS freq?

Mike

[IO540]

[how] do you depict something like a fast jet exercise

An even bigger point is that you don't need to. They can take place anywhere, so one would end up "depicting" the whole of the UK as not suitable for flying.

[Mike Cross]

An even bigger point is that you don't need to. They can take place anywhere, so one would end up "depicting" the whole of the UK as not suitable for flying.
Well IO you stay on the ground if you like, I prefer to to treat a Nav Warning as what it is, a warning rather than a prohibition. Wouldn't have been able to land and witnesss these yesterday if I'd treated the Nav Warning as an avoid;)
http://mrc0001.users.btopenworld.com/webimages/IMG_4283.jpg
http://mrc0001.users.btopenworld.com/webimages/IMG_4299.jpg
http://mrc0001.users.btopenworld.com/webimages/IMG_4325.jpg
http://mrc0001.users.btopenworld.com/webimages/IMG_4333.jpg

Who says you can't land dangly dunlops on 600m of grass?

[englishal]

Here is an example of the Cardiff Lars frequency change (UHF) depicted as a graphical Notam....

http://www.digital-reality.co.uk/ge3.jpg

I agree with IO to some extent, that the airspace depicted here probably contains many errors, but it was free. However, the data is available for free on the web, and it should be possible to keep it updated, ideally through an automated process, again ideally through from the official source. After all, it wouldn't take much for the clever chaps at AIS to generate a KML file from the electronic data they already have. Of course this would become a commercial product and we'd have to pay for it, but I think it'd be pretty good to be able to flight plan a 3D flight, including VNAV, showing 3D airspace, Notams etc.......

The CAA chart is just a section of the Memory Map chart I overlaid onto the map.....just for fun

Cheers

[172driver]

One of the main uses I can see - using the software 'as is' - could be in training. I know that many (if not most) PPL students struggle with the concept of airspace and how to visualize it in their minds - especially somewhat chaotic airspace as in the UK :E

Google Earth with this overlay should provide a real eye-opener to anyone learning about airspace and should make the whole concept much easier to grasp.

Also, flying through/into some tricky airspace for the first time (e.g. fields underlying a control zone a la Denham, etc), having a look at this airspace depiction before flying there would help positional awareness and perhaps reduce the 'zone busting' so often lamented in these pages.

Now of course, feeding the whole thing into a moving-map GPS would be pretty cool too :ok:

[tmmorris]

The 3d view of airspace is very useful indeed for training. I remember I got a free copy of a book on planning flights with a magazine a couple of years back (can't find it now) which had a 3d view of a planned flight from, ISTR, Oxford to Bembridge or similar, which showed the airspace in 3d and made the obvious point that you could therefore fly OVER some of the airspace if you couldn't get clearance. Obvious, but it hadn't really clicked with me yet, as I'd learned to fly at Welshpool where CAS isn't a problem. I've tried Google Earth on one of my colleagues who is a newish NPPL and he found it very illuminating.

Tim

[IO540]

Mike, I wasn't suggesting staying on the ground on a NAVW. I routinely ignore all of them (I do read them) - they are meaningless.

[jabberwok]

To some degree I agree with IO540. Unless you can guarantee that the data is complete and accurate it should not be used without backup in the form of kosher data.

Here's a shot of the forthcoming Cardiff/Bristol CTA changes designed for another program.

http://www.homepages.mcb.net/bones/Kinetic/UKAirspace-EGFF.gif

IO540 is right in saying it is donkey work to create this data and the latitude for error is very high. I don't mind designing this stuff for non operational programs but I would think twice if it was going to be used in a live environment.

I used to recode the data in my Garmin but stopped this when the enormity of continually updating the database sank in. Best left to experts.

[englishal]

Nice, I thought about sticking one of the Base Station (?) thingy's on the roof of my house.

Of course you are right, not to use this data for real flight planning or whatever, but the thing is that people are encoding this data every day for "official" products, and it wouldn't be hard to create a 3D GPS display. It is interesting to download your GPS track into the Google Earth after a flight just for the hell of it.....

In fact, I think it is VistaNav you can get in the USA, (which also has a gyro input) which is a purely synthetic 3D view, with terrain and airspace encoded which looks pretty cool. It is the way things are going, thats for sure.

[jabberwok]

It is interesting to download your GPS track into the Google Earth after a flight just for the hell of it.....

Yep - done that and there is some value in doing so. A good debrief tool.

I'm not convinced about the idea of creating a 3D GPS though. The FAA experimented with a 3D radar going back some years ago and it wasn't a success. Interpreting a 3D picture takes more brain power or summat.

Like many other spheres of life presentation is everything and a well designed 2D GPS can be a much easier tool to use than a bad one. I liked my Garmin GPSIII Pilot very much but it could be a nightmare to interpret in some TMA's. By comparison PocketFMS is much easier to read.

Enough though - I'm diverging from the thread.

[forget]

There's Google Earth update available - may have been there for a few days but I saw it today for the first time. Brilliant improvements :ok: