Frankfurt Plane Shadows
Until recently only visible in Google Earth, Maps users too can now see this super-cool sequence of aeroplane shadows above Germany’s largest airport, Frankfurt International.
The first one is the best I think, but it’s great how the shadow from the plane (which has been captured multiple times) fades out as the aircraft climbs higher.
Weirdly, just the first shadow has had its plane erased by the image-blending process, while the second, third and fourth planes can still be seen.
Much of Germany is now covered in excellent high-resolution imagery, so I’m sure we’ll have lots more good German sightings!
Thanks to Dominik Freitag, Sven Becker, Martin, Philipp Frey, Urs, Giovanni, andr3as and XF.
Those new images are really some high-quality ones! You can read out the airline name out of almost every plane!!
…and thanks for my first accepted submission!
:) 
…and for those of you who are interested, here’s the wikipedia link for the airport:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_airport
an improvement on the sperm post.
I have just check your German posts with the new hi-res images and some of them are even cooler now.
We unluckily missed the two trains crossing the brige shot but chck the TV tower
You said the second, third and fourth planes are visible, but I think you may be misinterpreting the sources of the shadows. All the shadows on the ground indicate that the sun is to the South West, throwing shadows to the North East. If that’s the case, then the first two shadows in the sequence come from planes that have disappeared in the image-blending process, and the three visible planes cast their shadows up and right — in which case the plane has climbed so high by the time of the last plane that its shadow is no longer visible.
Nice post, but even better - the site re-design! I usually read GS in my RSS reader so I’m probably behind the times, but it’s looking great these days - good work!
Yeah, I was about to say so, Andy. So, that means that this plane was photographed five times. For the first two times you couldn’t see the plane, and for the last one you couldn’t see the shadow. But I don’t think that you can only see the plane on the last one because the plane has climbed too high– I think the same thing happened there that happened with the first two shadows. Could anyone fill me in on how they take these photos?
Holy crap, awesome.
just south is a whole fleet of USAF C-130 and two C-5 Galaxies. Gotta love the Americans showing their force everywhere
I say it’s all the same plane definitly. And the first plane relates to the second shadow.
How do they take these? From a high altitude airplane, is the best I can say. When it was done on film, back in the good old days it was done on a long pice of film, and the srea was photographed ina long strip. With the spy planes, the film could be a mile long.
I think the smaller planes in the USAF Fleet are actually C-17’s (C-130’s are turboprops). Given that there are only some 124 C-5’s and 150 C-17’s, this looks like a big chunk of the USAF’s cargo fleet all in one place.
great quality pictures. thx