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Last week , some of my work colleagues and I, were playing about with the new flight simulator application hidden within Google Earth. We got talking about the famous adventurer Steve Fossett, who recently went missing on the 3rd September while flying his single-engine Citabria aircraft from an airfield in Yerington, Nevada and how Google Earth could be used to try and locate Steve Fossett or any possible crash site. After all, many eyes must be far better than just a few. Google Earth would offer the potential to search a larger area faster than in an aircraft.

So today I was pleased to read several articles about how Google Earth’s technology is providing help in the hunt for Steve Fossett and how Amazons search scheme ‘Mechanical Turk’ is aiming to focus searchers efforts by using new satellite imagery of Nevada.

Mechanical Turk is a human task service which assigns paid tasks to people to perform such as translating text or analysing imagery and photographs. Those wishing to take part in this search effort using Mechanical Turk can do so by registering here. Participants are asked to flag up anything they find which looks suspicious. Steve Fossett’s Citabria aircraft is about 22 feet long and on screen would equate to 21 pixels long by 30 pixels in width. Not very big considering the size of Nevada. The words Needle and haystack spring to mind.

You can also view the Nevada area yourself by loading in the this link into Google Earth or by copying and pasting the coordinates given by Mechanical Turk.

I’m not sure how effective this approach will be as the search patrols have already found several unknown wreckages, some of which date back several decades. It’s safe to say that the search area is massive but as I’ve said before many eyes must be better than just a few.

Making use of new online technologies such as Google Earth brings home just how powerful today’s internet has become in it’s short evolutionary history. Let’s hope that Steve Fossett can be found.

Tags: Google

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.