Where are all the airplanes in Google Maps

Factual Questions
1

I live not too far from Montreal’s Trudeau International Airport and have spent a fair bit of incidental time walking past it on surrounding roads. Pre-covid it was possible to stand on one road, at the end of the runway, and be able to count five or six approaching aircraft, lined up and receding into the distance, at any time during the day; presumable there was a similar number of departing aircraft also receding into the distance. So there should, at any time during the day, should be easily found aircraft in flight - and Trudeau airport is probably nothing compared to the likes of Heathrow, Charles de Gaul, and zillions of others.

However, if you go into Google Earth and look around any airports, there’s nothing. A few versions ago I was able to find one aircraft either approaching or departing a smaller airport near NYC, but that’s it. There should be tons and tons of airplanes by the various airports of the world, but there aren’t. To rip off the Fermi paradox - where is everybody?

2

Do you mean the satellite view? They pick shots that don’t have obstructions between the satellite and the ground.

I bet you don’t see any clouds either, and they’re even more common than airplanes.

3

Google Earth is formed of a composite of multiple images; they just pick the ones with airplanes, I’d imagine.

4

Same thing for cars in motion, and pedestrians too.

Technically, I think this is only in globe view; satellite still has them. (If you can’t tell this difference between satellite and globe view, satellite shows you only straight down, and globe lets to see from lots of angles.)

5

At the zoom levels in Google Maps that people mostly use, it’s not satellite photography, it’s aerial photos. And those are taken at a level below most commercial air traffic.

6

Well, there is a tragic loss of coolness - the Google Earth sky should be swarming with aircraft.

7

I used to have an app on my phone that let me take several pictures of a stationary object while people and/or cars passed in front of it and the app would create a composite image of the stationary object unobstructed by any moving object. Sounds like similar technology is used to create photo maps.

8

I have spotted airplanes in Google maps. I’ve also gone back and found that the airplane was gone, even though I knew exactly where it had been. Check wooded areas near airport runways. It is easier in wooded areas, fields, over water, etc.

9

Airplanes are small and there really aren’t that many of them compared to the size of the country.

10

Here’s a stealth bomber in caught mid-flight: Google Maps

11

I just saw that yesterday - very cool indeed.

12

Did no one notice you also don’t see many CARS in Google Maps?

13

This is hilarious. I expect that someone trying to use the map for what it is meant for—figuring out where things on the ground are—and having their view of it blocked by an aircraft that happened to be in that spot when a photograph was taken would not think “Wow, modern air travel is so cool that I don’t even care that this map is useless as a map.”

14

…and that’s when you switch from satellite to map view :smile:

15

But map view is like line drawings of streets and buildings, right? Does Google Earth have that? I just tried it out and I don’t see a way to turn that on.

Either way: I already know what the top of an airplane looks like. I want to see what the ground looks like. I think I’ve only ever used Google Earth for something other than noodling around once, and that was to look at houses and neighborhoods I was thinking about living in. And being able to see how much shade there was, and where there were sidewalks, and stuff like that was what I wanted. A paper map style drawing view wouldn’t have helped with that.

If you want to know what the top of a plane looks like, or where flightpaths are, there are other tools for that. That’s not what Google Earth is for.

16

The airplanes are in the captcha.

“To prove you’re not a robot, pick 3 images that contain airplanes.”

17

Not much of a STEALTH bomber is it?

[I kid, I know that Google cameras is not what the bomber is hiding from]

18

In the very early days of Google Earth, IIRC, there was a giant cockroach about a mile or more long visible somewhere in Germany.

19

In the UK, there was a giant pair of pliers in the sky from one location in street view - someone had run up to the street view car and balanced them on the camera dome while it was waiting at a junction apparently.

There was a thread here a long time ago about a plane visible on the satellite view of Google maps. Because of the speed of the plane, it had appeared as RGB colour separated versions of itself

20

There are no cars on the road in the satellite/aerial images of my community. That’s not surprising because even though the community is something like 50 square miles, the population is only about 40 these days.

There was one satellite/aerial image that they showed for a while that was rather interesting. There had been a large grass fire and the burned grass was visible so that gave a limit on how hold it could be. One of my brothers passed away about three weeks after the grass fire and his grave in the church cemetary had yet to be dug. From the shadows, it was clearly morning. Finally, with the cars in the church parking lot, it was clearly a Sunday. So the photo was taken on a Sunday morning between maybe about 10:45 and 12:00 on one of three Sundays in June between the fire and my brother’s funeral.