Final Glide Visualizer using Google Earth Plugin

Hi all,

I have been working on an aviation-related website, and one of the pieces generates aerial tours using the Google Earth plugin.

I've recently added a new feature to the site which should be useful to fellow soaring pilots. For any airport in the US airport database, you can see an approach in Google Earth, specifying your start distance, heading, glide ratio, plus your finish distance and height.

There are plenty of things on the site that work without the Google Earth plugin, but the aerial tour functionality is pretty fun, so grab a PC or Mac (sorry, no GE plugin on tablets or phones yet), install the Google Earth plugin, and visit your home base, starting he

http://www.aircraft.io/airportHome/

or you can try one of these airports:

http://www.aircraft.io/airport/TX23/ (my home base - Faultline Flyers near Austin, TX)
http://www.aircraft.io/airport/UT10/ (there you can watch one of Bruno's YouTube videos as well)

The default aerial tour will show 30:1 glides to 1 mile at 500 feet, but if you click the "Show Advanced Settings" link you can tweak all of the relevant settings.

I hope this is useful for exploring places you haven't flown yet. Please drop me a line if you have trouble using it, or have suggestions to make the site more useful to you.

I plan to add non-US airports in the future, but under the advanced tour settings, you can choose a tour type of "Approach to specified lat/lon" and enter the coordinates of any airport (or cow pasture!) of your choosing worldwide.

Thanks!

Andy
"AM"