A little WOW and Google Earth

By Gerry Graff 7/15/07

While it cannot match the exhilaration of your first Solo, there is a certain zip you feel in discovering Google Earth and the additions available that can get you flying on windy or rainy days. The first Wow is that all this is free, or close to it. For those who have not downloaded and played with Google Earth, the first thrill is taking to the sky and flying around without the noise of a prop, or consequences of an awful landing. There is lots of help from Google and other sources to get you flying, but first you need to get the free software from Google. Using a broadband connection is almost a must for all this. Google offers Windows, Linux, and in my case Macintosh versions. Get it free at http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html.

There really is not a lot of instruction needed to enjoy the Seven Wonders of the World on Google Earth. All you need to do is tell it where you want to go, and it will fly you there. Once there you can zoom, rotate, and even recreate your last flight for those not in the gondola. Once you have amazed yourself with your ability to fly level at 1000 feet over Albuquerque, you can start adding things, or placemarks to help with your CRSS.

Adding a placemark is easy, just select the “pushpin” icon and place it on the map. You can then save that placemark, and even email it to your crew (or yourself) to get you to the 19^th Street Launch site at 0-dark-thirty. You can also add polygons to Google Earth, and they can be three-dimensional. It is really not much of a chore to navigate to Duke Drive and Rio Grande Blvd., take a peek at the AIBF map, and create a “block” of space where we should not fly. I really do look forward to the day when some cutting-edge Balloon Rally emails me a KML file of all of their PZs, Launch Sites, Re-fueling location, and the rest of the geological information that I can look at before flying the next day, and gee, even put on the laptop to take with me. And then, wouldn’t it be nice if… well the answer is yes you can.

While you get Goggle Earth for free, you can add a Plus feature that allows you to connect your Garmin or Magellan to your laptop and get real-time GPS on Google Earth. Don’t have a Garmin or Magellan, no problem. There are small USB and Bluetooth ( http://www.usglobalsat.com ) GPS receivers that work fine when connected to your laptop, but require a third party plug-in (like gps2ge) for everything to work. There is a caveat to this. Google Earth is intended for use while being online. This allows Google to update their satellite pictures as time goes by so we can see a more current picture of Iran’s nuclear sites. Unless you are one of the chosen few with internet connectivity on your laptop, you will need to cache the Google Earth data prior to trying to go somewhere offline. This is easy to do, just fly over the area you are going to visit, and Google Earth will store the images on you laptop. You can change the size of the cache to something large enough that quite a bit of data will be saved on your machine.

To seasoned Google Earth users, all this is second hat, and the initial WOW has passed. In my Google Earth fantasy world, would it not be nice if I actually knew the boundaries of the Airspace I am about to fly in. Yes I already know that when I get near Coors and Montano, and fly above 7800’ and below 9400’ that I will be in Class C airspace, and have additional pilot responsibilities. (All right I cheated and looked it up.) Anyway, what about the rest of the boundaries? With Google Earth, you can overlay the appropriate Sectional to that point on earth you are viewing. Just as you can export a KML file that you have created, there is a world of KMX (KML files that are compressed) files that you can add to Google Earth. This is in addition to the already enormous database that comes with Google Earth, including Schools, Parks, State Parks (Petroglyph Boundaries anyone?), and even Red Light Camera Locations. There are free Aeronautical Charts on the web, but I prefered to spend the whopping 99 cents for a sectional that is current. These are available at Chart Geeks .com (http://www.chartgeek.com/). The one for Albuquerque can be found at:

https://shop.chartgeek.com/displayProductDocument.hg?productId=18&categoryId=10

Fair warning, these charts are 50mb downloads. Once you have downloaded the chart, you need to overlay it onto Google maps. For better destructions on how to do this see:

http://www.wikihow.com/Overlay-Sectional-Aeronautical-Charts-in-Google-Earth .

I found that I had to adjust the transparency of the Sectional in Google Earth (the slider at the bottom) to see the roads, etc. behind (underneath) the sectional, but now for the first time, I can see that 600’ tall tower shown on the Sectional, that I only imagined before. So being WOWed for a little while over this, it just seems that the Sectional Looked flat, and Google Earth is 3-D. I didn’t stay bummed for long as Lloyd Bailey came to the rescue. He has diligently taken those Sectional Magenta Lines and created vertical (3-D) Class “whatevers” and other airspaces. You can download these free at http://www.lloydbailey.net/airspace.html. They can be opened in Google Earth the same way as the Sectional Overlays.

Lastly, but definitely not leastly, it seems the National Weather service got as WOWed as me about all this and is offering real time weather that can be viewed in Google Earth. Most of us can find our way to the Radar Page at the NWS website. Now, in the lower left hand corner there is a link (in bright red as of this writing) that reads “KML.” This is the link will let you get all sorts of fun stuff to look at in Google Earth. Similar type overlays are also available for The Weather Channel Information at

http://www.gearthhacks.com/dlfile711/Weather-Channel-Satellite-Mosaic-v-1.0.htm