Have you ever wondered how they get planes clean? Well at Heathrow we can see the plane cleaning crews hard at work, but for some reason it’s the wet outlines of absent planes that are the most interesting.

Anyone who has read our book would already know that there’s just one automatic plane wash in the whole world – and we can see it clearly at Tokyo’s International airport.

Since we first wrote about Tokyo’s plane wash, Street View has given us another view of the structure – which from this angle looks like a big plane made from scaffolding!

See our previous post on The Langoliers.

Thanks to ChrisW.

Here’s a nice new crop circle we haven’t seen before, south of Leeds, England, and handily for drivers who might be fans of crop art, this is right next to the M1 motorway. Funnily enough, the M1 seems to be a bit of a hotspot for crop circles, as we’ve previously featured several others just 11 miles south, beside exactly the same road. Strange huh?

Just south of Swindon, there’s another crop circle we haven’t seen before, but this time it’s a pretty cool-looking spiral shaped one. But as there’s clearly no motorway, why put one here?

Yup, you guessed it. This is directly west of “the world’s busiest international airport”¹, Heathrow.

If only we knew what these symbols were trying to tell us, eh?

Thanks to JT, AWDfury and GEarth Hacks. Read more about crop circles at wikipedia.

Continuing this week’s semi-theme of very large things, we present the world’s largest airport near Dammam, Saudi Arabia!

Although it’s nowhere near what I’d expect from such a grand title. Compare its tiny, empty terminal to the bustling Heathrow airport and you’d be forgiven for thinking I was making it all up.

You see, King Fahd International is the world’s largest airport by area, and at 780 km² it is bigger than the nearby country of Bahrain. There’s 698,585 people in Bahrain and they’ve still got three airports!

Wikipedia for King Fahd.

With the recent image updates to central London we can see how they’re getting on with the controversial Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport.

The aerial image was taken earlier this year and although there’s been some progress they still have a lot of work to do before it whole thing opens in 2011, by which point BAA will likely have spent over £4.2 billion.

These days that sort of money buys you 60 aircraft stands, 2 satellite terminals, a new control tower, a new motorway junction, a 4000 space car park, a new hotel, bored tunnel rail links, diversion of two rivers and the design of a roundabout to say “T5″.

Thanks: Adam

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.