Simviation Forums

Jusy how old are the images???? I was looking at some UK airports on this wonderful peice of equipment and noticed so many blemishes.
Here is showed an American Airlines 767 at Birmingham Airport. This plane hasn't been here for many years!!!!


And again another fault. Here is an Air Canada 747, at Heathrow, these were put out of use in 2004.


Another few things I noticed were the amount of United Airlines planes at Heathrow (about 4) which is crazy seen as they now only operate once daily. About 7 planes on runway 9L at Heathrow and a Turkish a340. No idea if this still runs but was nice to see.


Comments welcome, Rich

I think it depends on the location.  I have found places I know that were taken nearly a year apart.  The one farm I used to work on had some piles of flooring tiles outside that I was able to put a date to due to the location of them.  It was sometime last spring.  But then I went north to the other farm I worked on and found a large barn that hasnt existed for about 2 years now  So who knows

I would imagine they are rather old, as the Google Earth/Maps program is over a year old, and it took time to accumulate the imagery they have already.

well most of the imagery for these kinds of programs and resouces were taken in 2003, by the USGS.

some have updated, more frequently the urban areas. and espically in the U.S. too. i mean heathrow looks terrible on my Google earth, as if it hasn't been updated since the mid-90's (oh how ancient )

ramos

Not only are photos of different ages, but they also update every now and then.  And the updates don't necessarily bring them all the way up to date.  I often notice that other users have indicated mobile things on the maps which simply aren't there anymore.  Perhaps some of these are people placing the markers at the wrong coordinates, but when there are lots indicating the same item it's likely that the item was there before some update took place.

If you look at Warton, england, you'll find a Saudi C130 parked up next to one of the runways, and a trio of Air Cadet motor gliders parked on the pan. It might well be me in the cockpit of one of them!!  :D - the ATC rarely flys from warton, and the last time i was there (4/5 years back) there was a C130 parked just were that one is in the pics.

OK its all crazy, but how often do they actually update thier pictures and do they just change them to random satilitte images because i'm sure that when i got the programme a few months ago that AA 767 wasn't there

If you open up the "Layers" menu and scroll down to the bottom you'll see some folders labled DG Coverage - 2005, DG Coverage - 2004, etc.  Click on the boxes next to them to display that data in Google Earth.  Don't know for sure but it looks like it indicates when some of the imagery was taken.  

Some of the UK google earth images are being replaced by higher resolution images which actually predate the ones they are replacing, so this doesn't surprise me. For example if you look at Brooklands on Google earth, you'll see a runway, whereas a couple of months ago the photo showed it after it had been torn up!