| ▲ | thinkingemote 2 days ago | ||||||||||||||||
>we don't and can't do this 10 months ago there was an Ask HN: No planes visible at LHR on Google Maps Satellite view. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841727 No planes at all on the ground, none at any gates, none parked outside. I gave some thoughts (corona, bank holiday) but you would expect to see at least a couple. Seems like the imagery was altered: that someone did and can do that. edits - another explanation could be that the airport was closed so that the plane taking the photos could fly over it. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | jofer 2 days ago | parent [-] | ||||||||||||||||
That's a common request for manually-created mosaics. Those are often used in flight simulation software. They want all planes manually photoshopped out of airports because they don't want you to look like you're running into another plane when landing/etc. It's a surprisingly big business for flight training. Google is probably sourcing from some of those. By "we" I mean my company and my product does not do that. That part holds. (or, well, more precisely, that's a different product that I don't work on and isn't marketed as "imagery") But yes, some other mosaic products are specifically requested with planes photoshopped out of airports and all waterbodies a consistent artificial color so that sunglint can be automatically simulated in flight sims for training pilots. Because that data is often a high quality dataset available for purchase, sometimes google/etc reuses those datasets. | |||||||||||||||||
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