Another Analyst Staring Out The (Airplane) Window

I've been following Jon Udell's blog for the thread re data control and privacy, and found myself bemused by his habit of watching the landscape scroll past from the airplane window seat. A soul mate! I've been taking the window seat for some 35 years now for the same reason, and still can't get enough of it. It's a show to beat whatever rubbish is on the seatback LCD panel. Snake River canyon! Center pivots! Greenland fjords! Tracing defunct railroads across the old Northwest! What's not to like? I've picked vacation spots just because I had to get my feet onto that terrain down there.

Jon's got some ideas for a realtime synch between Google Earth and his airborne position. GE is a bit bandwidth consuming, let's say, for in flight use. My recent wanderings have featured another solution. Since I've gotten bitten by the geocaching bug (I can quit any time...) I've had a hand-held GPSr along on trips, and they turn out to work quite well airborne. Yes, you're in a metal tube, but the improved LOS to the satellites seems to at least offset that problem. (I use Magellans, because they'll hold lock in redwood forests, but the latest Garmins with the SiRF chipset are as good or better.)

Turn on backtrack and set map mode for a large span, then work on calibrating your 'head declination' against lateral distance from 35,000 feet. I've never bothered to download the track into a mapping program, but I have written down the nearest named town or waypoint to a feature of interest and tracked it down in a DeLorme book or GE later on.

Udell cites Doc Searls as another window watcher. How many more geogawkers are out there?

Comments

[Sam Pullara]

I've used my GPS unit on aircraft but these days its actually listed in the back of the magazine that you're not supposed to. Most flight attendants don't know that though. After I used it on an international flight for like 8 hours I never did get the average speed down to below 200mph.

[Ole Eichhorn]

Me me me. I would pay extra for a window, every time.

[Raj Bala]

One of my favorite trips for landscape surfing was to Tokyo from the US. I wasn't sure exactly where we were (something was wrong with the map channel), but I assume over Alaska perhaps. It was stunning scenery. The landscape was so inviting -- childhood senses of sliding down a snow covered hill returned in a large way.

[Tim Oren]

Sam, if you clear the backtrack / breadcrumbs out of the GPSr, it should have the side effect of resetting the average MPH.

[Alan Little]

I used to be - Nevada would be prettty near the top of my list of places to have flown over thinking "wow, it looks interesting down there".

These days, though, I fly less on business and far-flung vacation trips, and more on family visits to toddlers within Europe. Western Europe isn't so interesting to gaze down on; and even when we fly to my wife's family in Russia, a bored three year old tends to be unimpressed with comments like "hey, those must be the Tatra mountains"

GPS, however, is for wimps (that's my school days competitive orienteering background talking)

[Jonathan]

I've always enjoyed the window view. Rather than use GPS I make photos, most of which are crap but every once in a while I get a keeper (e.g., this and this). The prospect of some free time to take photos makes flights much more enjoyable than they used to be.

[Jason Riley]

You sound like my wife. She's a photographer who likes to while away long flights by taking photographs of interesting views. Once home she uses Google Earth to locate the spot, and often tags locations with the better shots. What is really needed is GPS in her Canon (which can't be far away as Ricoh have a consumer one). Downside is I'm often relegated to the middle seat, and we get some funny looks when she wet wipes the window at takeoff.

[Chris]

A friend of mine thought an interesting business would be linking the planes GPS to the in seat displays showing what was below and giving info on those places as well. Apparently inspired by a book from this site: http://www.windowseat.info

I think the economic model is difficult but it would be fun as a passenger. perhaps even more challenging at night.

[Roy]

Re: linking the planes GPS to the in seat displays...

Can't be more boring than some of the in flight movies
we get saddled with these days.

[melissa lee]

definately. most interesting application was a trip to tanzania. there's a "cooperative" effort called tracks4africa you can purchase a GPS map overlay for a nominal fee covering details of africa. We used our GPS extensively to confuse the heck out of our guide (how did we know that town was coming up?) but more importantly verifying our location during all our charter flight hops. In unfamiliar territory it was a great way to to know we have not been sidetracked and *could* find our way home past the cheetahs if abandoned in the serengetti ;) We also used our gps to mark our scuba dive entry points to calculate current speed.