in-flight google

[cos]

I'm typing this entry on the flight home, while enjoying one of my favorite new tech toy discoveries ever!

On the flight out to California last week, I looked forward to looking at Google Maps after I landed, to use their nifty new easy-panning satellite view to identify things I'd seen from the plane. I made mental note of features I wanted to identify, and approximately where they were. After I landed, for example, I was quite pleased to locate this lake and funny landbridge, just west of Granby and Simsbury, CT (where fyfer and my ex Leah were from).

Shortly before the flight back home today, I had a thought: When I pan around Google's satellite view, it feels like it's caching what I look at. When I scroll into new areas, it loads from the net, and when I scroll back to places I've just looked it, it doesn't go to the net again until I zoom. Could I preload my flight route, before getting on the plane?

I can!

Usually I rely on memories from the ground. I know most of the roads, and remember the general shape and color of the land - where the mountains are, the farms, the major lakes and rivers. I can estimate location pretty well by looking at the clock, knowing that most flights go about 500mph (460-530). This method works pretty well for identifying roads and cities, and for knowing more or less which state I'm over. But there are always plenty of features I wonder about. Now, instead of trying to figure it out later, I can follow along on google as I fly.

(one thing that would make this work much better, is if google supplied a map scale, so I could estimate how far to scroll in areas where there are no obvious markers like lakes or cities)

This is a particularly cool area to fly over. [Added after landing: I was on the right side of the plane, with a great view ot the huge mountains in the southwest corner of Wyoming, and the Flaming Gorge national recreation area. I've driven I-80 across just north of those mountains a couple of times; I've never been to Flaming Gorge. We passed just north of the upper tip of the lake, where it splits, so I got a close-up of the whole thing.]

This makes me so happy!

Comments

This is offtopic...

[the-ogre.livejournal.com]

...but it was good to see you, even briefly, on Saturday night.

Re: This is offtopic...

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Why does this connection not surprise me...

I'm looking into a trip out west in June, btw.

Re: This is offtopic...

[cos]

Thanks!

[summerrose.livejournal.com]

That's so neat. How do you figure out what areas you need to load before the flight?

[cos]

It's not hard. You know where you're starting and where you're ending up, scroll through that path and then some more to either side. East-west routes in the US tend to curve to the north (it's a bit shorter to go around that way). I haven't flown enough north-south to know where they tend to curve, but the Boston->Atlanta leg on my flight out started out going almost due west for a while, and stayed inland, so that's my first data point.

For most northeast-west coast trips, I already remember the route anyway. I knew SF->Salt Lake City (first leg of yesterday's trip) was gonna mostly follow I-80 without having to think about it.

[fyfer.livejournal.com]

Oh! It's Barkhampstead resevoir, which is in Hartland, one town west of Granby. I misremembered and thought you'd said north of Granby, not west (I hadn't looked at the map link you sent before), so I was thinking of the lakes in the "notch".

The resevoir was a popular place to go hang out and drink. It was pretty damn rural. I didn't spend much time exploring around there, though.

[cos]

Neat. So what is that funny landbridge - is it a dam? Or are there two separate bodies of water?

[fyfer.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that's the dam where the road crosses.

[ellipticcurve.livejournal.com]

Wow! How terribly cool. Thanks for the tip!

I always like to know what I'm flying over. Makes the trip WAY more interesting.

[fyfer.livejournal.com]

On the return leg of my first trip back to Boston after moving here, I realized the plane route was about exactly the route I had driven. I looked down over Arizona and recognized the small road we drove up to reach the north rim of the Grand Canyon. It was a really cool feeling.

[cos]

I had the same feeling the first time I flew to the west coast after my first cross country trip, in 1998. A large part of the flight followed near one of the routes I'd driven (I did sort of a circuit, to SF on the way out, and from Portland OR on the way back, so I drove two different routes).

These days, though, I pretty much expect every flight I take in the US to pass over places I've driven :) It's still really cool, but in a different way.