Flight Plans and Google
 

Is there a web site that will combine Google Maps (or something like that)with a flight plan so I can see in advance, some of the cities and topography I'll be flying over? Thanks in advance.

I use www.flightaware.com to track flights. Select a flight and then trick on the 'track log' link. It'll show you the latitude and longitude minute by minute for the flight. There will be day to day variation, but you'll see the route a specific flight took.

Not sure how you'd overlay that with a city/terrain map. Perhaps if you had gps software you could import a route that had you going from point to point.

I just checked and it's easy to import the data from flightaware into my MS Maps & Streets program. You may need to do some data parsing in Excel, but I simply made a spreadsheet with 2 columns then imported it.

Pretty cool.

thanks for your help

I think you are assuming that the flight path is established well in advance of the flight and never changes.

In fact, the actual path is selected immediately before takeoff, and is often amended during flight. Weather is the biggest factor, and it is not uncommon that a flight will go hundreds of miles off the ideal path because of weather, or traffic.

When we fly CLE SAN via IAH, sometimes we pass near the grand canyon, but often we don't. One time the pilot (he must have been approaching retirement) got permission from the controllers to vary his path and show us the grand canyon; I would guess the bean counters would not countenance such a waste of fuel, but the passengers and cabin crew all appreciated the gesture.

So it is easy to check the flight path during the flight, but before the flight all you would get, at best, is a guess.

Thanks Clevelandbrown. Actually for now, I just want to be an armchair traveler and use the computer as if I was flying on autopilot. When flying for real, I find it so relaxing to look out the window and see the country. (No I'm not crazy, the rest of flying sucks) I would love to do the same on the computer and also have the landmarks superimposed so I know what i'm looking at 35,000 ft up in the air. i was hoping that Google had something like that.

What route are you looking at flying? I can pull up the data and plot on my MS maps tool.

Domestic flight plans are selected well in advance and hardly vary unless severe weather or traffic threaten. The only deviations are likely to be during departure and arrival, and even these tend to be small. The same routes are used over and over again.

I'm not sure about flying over the Grand Canyon. The national park is an SFRA with severe flying restrictions. If you are flying at typical jet cruising altitudes, no problem, although you won't be very close to the canyon. To fly low above the canyon, you need to satisfy special criteria and/or get special permission, which isn't likely for a regularly scheduled airline flight.

FlightAware will show you the path but also the actual route filed for the flight. You can use aeronautical charts to relate this to landmarks, cities, etc., although this is very tedious.

Check this out...
http://tinyurl.com/3cludv

This is a hidden feature of a Flight Simulator in Google Earth. Once you figure out how to make it work, it is really cool. I swear I found out about it on this board even...