Final Glide Visualizer using Google Earth Plugin

[AJM]

Hi all,

I have been working on an aviation-related website, and one of the pieces generates aerial tours using the Google Earth plugin.

I've recently added a new feature to the site which should be useful to fellow soaring pilots. For any airport in the US airport database, you can see an approach in Google Earth, specifying your start distance, heading, glide ratio, plus your finish distance and height.

There are plenty of things on the site that work without the Google Earth plugin, but the aerial tour functionality is pretty fun, so grab a PC or Mac (sorry, no GE plugin on tablets or phones yet), install the Google Earth plugin, and visit your home base, starting here:

http://www.aircraft.io/airportHome/

or you can try one of these airports:

http://www.aircraft.io/airport/TX23/ (my home base - Faultline Flyers near Austin, TX)
http://www.aircraft.io/airport/UT10/ (there you can watch one of Bruno's YouTube videos as well)

The default aerial tour will show 30:1 glides to 1 mile at 500 feet, but if you click the "Show Advanced Settings" link you can tweak all of the relevant settings.

I hope this is useful for exploring places you haven't flown yet. Please drop me a line if you have trouble using it, or have suggestions to make the site more useful to you.

I plan to add non-US airports in the future, but under the advanced tour settings, you can choose a tour type of "Approach to specified lat/lon" and enter the coordinates of any airport (or cow pasture!) of your choosing worldwide.

Thanks!

Andy
"AM"

[Tom K (TK)]

Worked great for our little Refugio Soaring Circle homebase of Rooke Field, TX.

[Eric Bick (1DB)]

Cool, and instructive. What might be a helpful add is current altitude (MSL/AGL) display, particularly starting altitude.

[[email protected]]

On Friday, January 10, 2014 3:19:19 PM UTC-8, Eric Bick (1DB) wrote:
> Cool, and instructive. What might be a helpful add is current altitude (MSL/AGL) display, particularly starting altitude.

Very cool. Helps a lot in visualizing final glides that need to clear mountain passes, ridges, etc. "If I can clear this pass what's my glide home?" kind of questions.

I agree with Eric. I kept wanting to know what's the altitude and clearance above the surrounding terrain as the glide crossed ridgelines in particular.

9B

[AJM]

On Saturday, January 11, 2014 11:17:52 AM UTC-6, wrote:
> On Friday, January 10, 2014 3:19:19 PM UTC-8, Eric Bick (1DB) wrote:
>
> > Cool, and instructive. What might be a helpful add is current altitude (MSL/AGL) display, particularly starting altitude.
>
>
> Very cool. Helps a lot in visualizing final glides that need to clear mountain passes, ridges, etc. "If I can clear this pass what's my glide home?" kind of questions.
>
>
> I agree with Eric. I kept wanting to know what's the altitude and clearance above the surrounding terrain as the glide crossed ridgelines in particular.
>
> 9B

I'm glad it's useful for you guys! It turns out that the Google Earth plugin has a status bar, which I just enabled. It will show you the camera altitude, and the terrain height underneath it. I could not see an AGL option, so for now, you'll have to subtract the two. Google Earth estimates the height at a given point from imagery, so it can be a bit jumpy. And definitely don't bet your bacon on any numbers coming out of Google Earth!

Also, the status bar lets you go back in time and see older versions of satellite imagery. Though the quality seems to degrade as you go back.

AM

[AJM]

> It will show you the camera altitude, and the terrain height underneath it.

Actually, it looks like the status bar shows you the camera altitude, and the height of the point under the cursor. So where you place the cursor during the animation is important. For your purposes, in the lower center of the Google Earth plugin would probably work best.

AM