Google knows all

I brought the Garmin 295 back from the hangar today to charge up the batteries that I keep in it for backup in case I lose power from the airplane tonight. I spent a little time fiddling around with it, learning how to extract the track files and map them onto Google Earth.

To understand the results, re-familiarize yourself with this trip to Lima earlier this month that I made with Co-pilot Egg:

http://n466pg.blogspot.com/2007/11/saturday-with-co-pilot-egg.html

In this first screen shot of the trip, you can see where we stopped for gas at Madco, and you can see the leg where Egg was doing the flying:



The fine ground-to-air shots that Brandon took and sent to me were the result of a low pass down the runway, from which we flew a full left traffic pattern around again to landing. You can see that in the next two:





Back at Bolton, you can see how precise the alignment is between the GPS and Google Earth by the way it shows us right down the center of the runway:





Simply. Amazing.

Blogger, on the other hand, is still refusing to just open the larger image when you click on the smaller picture. Inconvenient, that.

Update: Blogger released a method for fixing the pictures, but it's a bit of a bother to do. Blogger: worth exactly what you pay for it sometimes.