Where are all the airplanes in Google Maps

I found one today!..but then realized you had already posted it. You have made me very angry. Very angry indeed!

I can better that. My sister was looking at the old rural church and cemetery near where we grew up, and noticed in Google Maps it showed a funeral in progress, with cars and the hearse present. Looking at the meta data, she fguured out that it was our brother’s funeral. My car is one of those in the image. Creepy! (They’ve updated the map since then, but I did a screenshot for posterity sakes.)

Stay in your lane. You don’t hear me talking about my spidey-sense tingling…

Taking the photographs from planes is probably a significant part of the reason why (other) planes don’t appear often in the data - ideally (not always, but ideally) planes stay separated from one another in all three dimensions.

Also, the stitching of photos together may make it appear that the photography was captured from a greater height than it really was (you can zoom out/up to the extent that you are seeing more than the plane’s camera saw, is what I mean). I recall seeing some mapping planes come over my way years ago, and they were fairly low - not dangerously low, of course, but low enough that most of the other planes that might have crossed paths with them, would probably have been above.

Yanno what makes my Spidey-sense tingle? When there’s a big Kaboom :thinking:

Reminds me of the Lancaster over Stukeley Meadows (Cambridgeshire, UK) from years ago - one of the first ‘Gosh, there’s a plane …’ I was aware of but in Google Earth (not Maps)

Mother of God … that was 16 years ago! Where has this century gone?

As a former air traffic controller I can tell you this is not true. At all. Planes fly over other planes all the time. True, most often they are separated by several thousands of feet, but one thousand feet vertical is the IFR separation minimum (below Flight Level 410, or FL 290 for some aircraft). VFR aircraft - which would be the aircraft doing aerial photography, I’ve worked those guys a million times - only need 500 feet of vertical separation.

True, we usually didn’t vector aircraft purposely to fly directly over another one, but if it did happen we didn’t care as long as we had the vertical spacing. And since our airspace only went up to 10,000 feet anyway, all those aircraft cruising along at flight levels over us could easily overfly our airplanes and we wouldn’t even notice it.

We were less interested in keeping those aircraft away in three dimensions than we were in ensuring that we didn’t violate that basic law of physics - the one that says two objects can’t occupy the exact same space at the exact same time. :sunglasses:

I stand corrected - thank you. I thought I had learned that factoid from various pilot/aviation vloggers, but I must have misunderstood something.

In England, they have canals with narrow boats on them. I guess many people live on them and travel from place to place along the canals.

Thinking about this thread, I pulled up Google Maps and searched for boats on the canals. It was easy to find boats that were moored, but I had to look a while to find one that wasn’t moored (it looked like it was in the middle of the canal but hard to verify it was moving).

On the other hand, when I decided to look at streetview pictures of the canals, the first one I looked at had a narrow boat that was clearly in motion at the time the picture was taken.