A lost plane found on Google Earth

    After two and a half years of searching, the relatives still found a private plane, which disappeared without a trace in the forests of Arizona on September 24, 2006. The find was made possible thanks to an army of online helpers who discovered the disaster area through Google Earth .

    The story is actually quite long. The search was unsuccessful until one of the participants in the search found amateur photos somewhere on the Web, taken by some biker in the desired area and dated precisely with the days of the alleged disaster. One of the images showed a plot in the forest where traces of a recent fire were clearly visible ( smoke in the photo ).

    But the problem is that no one knew the coordinates where the photo was taken. This is where crowdsourcing through Google Earth helped. According to the aerial photographs of Arizona forests, it was possible to perfectly accurately determine the place where the photograph was taken (see comparative analysis of topographic signs ).

    An expedition was immediately organized into the discovered area, they found a crash site, and now the authorities have officially confirmed that yes, these are really the wreckage of the missing N2700Q aircraft .

    The place with smoke in the photo perfectly matched all the search criteria for the crash site. By the way, the criteria for searching for a crash site themselves are the result of careful work on the analysis of the flight path, altitude and speed of the aircraft, analysis of walking routes in that area, areas already surveyed, etc. A total of 15 criteria were taken into account, they are shown in the diagram .



    This analysis system for searching for missing planes using Google Earth information may well be used in the future. The developers called it MARSI (Mapped Archive of Rescue & Search Information) and published the entire methodology on their website.

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