Wasting a day with Google Earth

I wasted, literally, the entire day messing around with Google Earth.

First, I thought it would be interesting to learn how to display a flight path on Google Earth, so I spent the morning learning how to create a file that would do just that.

For giggles I decided to add some waypoints for the GPS-14L approach into Crystal, then fly the approach and upload the track to see how well I did. In theory, this could be a useful teaching tool.

It turnd out to be easy enough, although my altitude is all screwed up on the map because I used feet and Google Earth wants meters. That's simple enough to fix.



I fired up X-Plane, turned on it's data dump feature and departed Flying Cloud then flew the GPS-14L approach into Crystal. A little quality time with a spreadsheet and I had my plot of lat/long/altitude to drop into Google Earth. (It was easier to just fly it in a sim than trudge out to the airport, fly the thing and figure out how to get a tracklog out of my GPS. I just wanted to see if it could be done.)

Turns out, I wasn't the first to think of this. Check out this post at Vectors to Final.

My .KML file from this exercise is here if you want to save it, load it up in Google Earth and see the thing in three-dimensions.

Then I was struck with what I thought was an even simpler idea: Create a three-dimensional map of the Minneapolis Class Bravo airspace using Google Earth. The idea was that it'd be really neat to show to students the airspace in three-dimensions.

Well, it turned out to be waay harder than I imagined. The problem I ran into is it while it's really easy to create a single circle that rises from ground level to a particular altitude (in this case the 10,000 foot ceiling of the airspace) it's apparently impossible to create a circle that starts at a particular altitude and then rises to another altitude.



In other words, creating the inner-ring of the MSP Class B was simple. Creating the subsequent outer rings is something I haven't figured out how to do yet. I can get the base of the rings to show up at the proper altitude, I just can't fill them up to the 10,000 foot level.

And I haven't even tackled the odd-shaped cutouts in the airspace yet.

Anyway, my brain is full and I'm in serious need of a beer.

If anybody out there can figure this one out I'll buy you a six-pack.

Here's my .KML file. Feel free to save it and open it with Google Earth and play around for yourself.