Back in the USA

So my little brother and sister-in-law took a vacation to Europe. A great feet on his part to finally make a trip back to Europe. So for 17 days I've been house & dog sitting and could use a vacation myself.

Habit is formed around 3 weeks of repeating the same process over and over. I firmly believe this, since their return, I can't help but feel that I'm suppose to head over to his house to gather mail and take care of the dogs.

I was ready for them to return and started looking around at was to track the flight progress. I found a few sites that gave basic information and even found a decent site that showed a basic image of the planes location. I end up at a really cool site that took advantage of Google Earth and gave a some what detailed and 3-d view of the flight in from Paris to Chicago.

Its really nice to rotate and change the elevation and see the details as to elevation of the flight and speed of travel. Here you can see the plane making its way towards Chicago's International Airport. You can even get detailed information on other planes in the area as well.

I was lucky to view this for free online, it just so happened that the Chicago Airport tracking is free from the site I was visiting. They offer a service for all airports and flights for around $9.95 a month. The only thing is I can't see where I would need to pay for a service like this really. I suppose some business out there might have a need for information like this and I only found out the additional costs after trying to watch his flight from Chicago to DFW later that evening.

Here's a shot of the plane making a turn back towards the airport for final approach and landing. Was neat to tell my brother about how I watched all of this and the detail. He asked me if they made a turn or circle and I said they sure did. It was also cool to watch all the other planes line up for their turn at landing.

Here is a head on shot of the plane coming in for its landing. For some reason the site stopped updating on the landing and appeared to maintain a holding pattern. I later saw on the Airline site that the plane had made its landing. Oh well the end of watching flights with Google Earth, I suppose at some point I could decide and watch some other flights for the fun of it, if I get that bored I would say.

Here is a pretty cool view from above at the Chicago International airport. Its pretty cool to see some of the really detailed photos of some of the larger cities. I showed my daughter a really cool view of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, thanks to Google Earth. I think some day I'll need to take her in person. Check out Google Earth sometime and then do a search on tracking flights with Google Earth.