Back in August, Google Earth enabled users to dive deep under the world beneath waterbodies. The offering from the Internet giant is now ready to fly high as a post on the Google Latlong blog revealed that users can view the location and altitude of numerous flights in near real-time.
Teaming up with Flightwise.com, the company has published a new KML file which will update information related to commercial flights over the US. The file has been developed with the data available from Flightwise’s website. This information is said to have been gathered from the FAA at regular intervals.
To derive data about a flight, users can hover over an airplane icon which will divulge details about the airline, flight number and its path till that time. By clicking on this icon, they can receive details including the estimated arrival time. Those who wish to download a full KML tour of the flight can simply click the ‘Download flight path’ link in the balloon. This file allows users to play back and rewind the route tracing the flight’s journey up to that point.
The data will be displayed with a time lag of 15 to 20 minutes behind the actual time on average, owing to FAA restrictions and timing of data pulses. The post has further disclosed that users can click a snapshot of all the airplanes in the air and save the layer to ‘My Places’ panel. They can check the layer to automatically update information every few minutes.
After receiving a view of the world lying under oceans and now of the hovering sky, we look forward to more news from the Google Earth Team.