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Leisure Travel ENJOYING LIFE WITH YOUR PLANE
Google's New Travel Planning Tools
 Aside from actually taking a trip, planning a cross-country can be one of the exciting parts of aviation.
There is a thrill in choosing the destination and stops along the way. We feel it every time we put together an issue of Aviator’s Guide, and readers tell us their sense of adventure is tickled every time a new issue comes in the mail.
As you pull together your charts and other travel info, you’ll want to know as much about your destination as possible. Not just the weather and what the approaches are. You’ll also what to know what there is to see or do, and what the the proximity of local sites and attractions is to where you plan to be.
There are two new tools in your travel planning arsenal that will provide invaluable pre-trip insight for every journey. Google has launched two services: Google Maps with street and address info, and Google Earth.
The Google Earth service is the most impressive, and is provided thanks to Google’s purchase last year of Keyhole Corp., a Mountain View, California-base provider of digital mapping technology.
Using satellite and aircraft images as well as sophisticated modeling technology, Keyhole provides a visual image that is incredibly realistic, just like flying over the area you are looking at, or in this case, planning to visit.
Punch in an address on Google Earth, and you’ll quickly see the display zoom in from a whole earth view to local image of the location from as low as 3,500 feet. In areas where there is sufficient image detail, you can zoom in as low as a few hundred feet, and you can even tilt the view to show images approximating what you would see from the air in a particular location.
You can take a view of Manhattan, for example, and zoom and tilt it so that it looks much as it does flying down the Hudson River at 1,100 feet. Zoom lower and your view is even obstructed by buildings that are rendered on the image at the appropriate height.
Just click the “Dining” button and you’ll see hundreds of restaurants appear on the image. Narrow your search to a particular type of cuisine, and you can get a clear view of all of the Italian restaurants that would be visible from the Hudson River at 1,100 feet.
For more practical applications, you can zoom in on Harrisburg’s Capital Cities Airport and see the huge, white-roofed warehouses that mark the approach to runway 30. Click a couple of overlays, and you'll see that the Giant Food Store is right across Route 1003 from the approach end of Runway 12, and less than a mile up the road is the nearest food, a Subway sandwich shop.
Select Jekyll Island, Georgia, and Google Earth immediately pans out and then back in on one of the island's trademark golf courses. Click the hotel and restaurant overlays, and you can easily choose between a beach-front resort (the Jekyll Inn Oceanfront Resort), or a hotel close to the airport (the Jekyll Island Club Hotel).
For planning fuel stops, you can use Google Earth to identify airports that have fast food within walking distance of your FBO.
The satellite coverage is not always as detailed, and outside many major population centers, the detail is rather poor. This where the effectiveness of Google Maps comes into play. Although it does not offer the bird’s-eye-view of Google Earth, Google Maps provide the same level of overlay to a graphical street map layout.
Both tools provide invaluable travel planning insight, and both will help you get a bird’s-eye view of your destination and intended stops before you get there.
Finally, Internet-based tools that can add new meaning to that phrase, “know before you go.”
—Sean Fulton
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