On Saturday, January 11, 2014 11:17:52 AM UTC-6, wrote:
On Friday, January 10, 2014 3:19:19 PM UTC-8, Eric Bick (1DB) wrote:

Cool, and instructive. What might be a helpful add is current altitude (MSL/AGL) display, particularly starting altitude.


Very cool. Helps a lot in visualizing final glides that need to clear mountain passes, ridges, etc. "If I can clear this pass what's my glide home?" kind of questions.


I agree with Eric. I kept wanting to know what's the altitude and clearance above the surrounding terrain as the glide crossed ridgelines in particular.

9B

I'm glad it's useful for you guys! It turns out that the Google Earth plugin has a status bar, which I just enabled. It will show you the camera altitude, and the terrain height underneath it. I could not see an AGL option, so for now, you'll have to subtract the two. Google Earth estimates the height at a given point from imagery, so it can be a bit jumpy. And definitely don't bet your bacon on any numbers coming out of Google Earth!

Also, the status bar lets you go back in time and see older versions of satellite imagery. Though the quality seems to degrade as you go back.

AM