Over a seemingly dull field in California we find an unusual sight – a mid-air refuelling of a C-5 Galaxy by a smaller KC-135! Very, very cool.

The image ghosting is caused by the way satellite photographs are taken in two parts; one is high-resolution, but in black and white, and the other is a lower resolution but captures the colour. The second image is then sharpened with the first to create the colour images we see in Google Earth.

However, in the case of planes in flight, the plane has moved slightly between the two photographs. Now if we just knew how many milliseconds apart the two images are taken you could calculate the speed of the aircraft.

Thanks: Hoppilpolia, rob, chewbaccawokka, Ant, Frank and of course, Helomech from the Google Earth community.

Tropical Island Resort is a large artificial “exotic island” resort in Germany. The 107m tall building was designed and built as a hangar for CL160 Super Heavy-Lift Cargo Airships, but the airships were never constructed so the hangar was a bit useless.

A Malaysian company later bought the hangar and added artificial sunlight, palm trees, sand, swimming pools and bird noises to create the illusion of paradise. The resort is open 24hours all year round and perhaps as a homage to the building’s intended use there is a small blimp parked on the runway outside.

But all we really care about is the records – the dome is one of the largest buildings on Earth by volume but its true record is the world’s largest single hall without supporting pillars inside. Wooooo.

Thanks: Pille

Today we’re looking at E-3 Sentry AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) planes – they’re really just Boeing 707s with a 9.1m diameter rotating radar strapped onto the back, which provides airborne surveillance and battle management.

Starting in Britain there’s an E-3 Sentry at RAF Mildenhall. This is one of seven that the RAF purchased and named Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Bashful and Doc.

Hopping over to France we see 3 of 4 E-3s owned by the Armée de l’Air.

Further afield there’s Khorat airfield in Thailand. I think this is actually a US E-3 and part of “Cope Tiger”, an annual, multinational exercise for practising interoperability with U.S. Forces. There’s also various fighter planes to see just to the South.

The US Air Force owns 34 E-3s in total and 28 of them are stationed at Tinker AFB (although I only count 13). Tinker AFB’s claim to fame is that in 1948 the first ever Tornado warning was issused from here (about 3 hours before it hit).

Also worth seeing while we’re in the area is another Children’s Play Area and B-52 and B-1B bombers which, according to submitter “West,” are being refitted with new electronics to allow them to carry and drop JDAM munitions.

Thanks: Don Mecoy, Mike, DFarmer, DDA, Grant hutchins, West, pooms, CraX & teuf

Invasion of the fat planes! There’s a really fat green plane at Heathrow (which looks a little like Thunderbird 2)…

And at Hong Kong International, there’s some sort of fat pink alien spacecraft!

(Or these might be fire training aircraft of course…)

Update: from the comments, here’s a lime-green fatplane, and a white one which has some mysterious Dutch writing next to it…

Thanks to Mako, foo and Marco.

Here’s a plane in flight, here’s another one, and another. Ah, there’s hundreds of them – Boring! Now, here’s a School Bus In Flight. That’s much more interesting!

This is actually the City Museum in St. Louis. Built in an old shoe factory, the roof decor features two aircraft fuselages and a school bus.

Thanks: B.J. Olejnik