Everything “geo” is so trendy right now that you can’t turn around twice with someone geocoding this or placemarking that.

In fact it’s so trendy that even Hollywood actresses are getting in on the act with Angelina Jolie’s latest tattoo featuring 4 latitude and longitude cordinates¹.

Plugging the coordinates into Google Earth, the first leads us to Cambodia. This is supposedly where her first son, Maddox, was born.

Specifically, the lat/long leads us to a pond just outside the airport but I guess she was just aiming for the general area.

Following the next coordinate we are led to Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Abeba, where the eldest daughter Zahara was born.

For her third coordinate Angelina has gone a bit more specific, pointing to the Namibian beach resort of Swakopmund. This is where she gave birth to Brad Pitt’s baby Shiloh.

And lastly on our tour Angelina takes us to Ho Chi Minh City, the largest city in Vietnam, where latest addition Pax Thien was born.

Of course, if she wanted to be really up-to-the-minute she should have had a KML file tattooed down her arm instead

Thanks: AndrewAnorak

This post was updated 29th July 2007

On the 19th of June 2005, a Mahfooz Aviation Boeing 707-347C crashed while landing at Addis Ababa-Bole Airport in Ethiopia. Luckily all 5 crew survived, but the aircraft was written off.

Although I could be wrong (hey, it’s happened before), I believe that this Google Earth satellite photo shows the wreckage of that exact crashed plane!

So, what’s my proof? Firstly, the original Google Earth satellite photo was dated as November 2005 and the June crash is the only Addis Ababa-Bole Airport incident listed on the Aviation Safety Network for the whole of 2005.

For further proof I measured the wingspan of the crashed plane using the Google Earth ruler, and it more or less matches the 44.42 m wingspan of a 707-320B.

In December 2006 we took the following screenshot from Google Earth, which showed the plane’s fuselage as little more than a pile of rubble.

The next screenshot was taken in July 2007 when Google Earth’s imagery for the region had been updated.

This shows the fuselage of the plane complete, with the tail section broken off and lying to the side. There is clearly a path of debris leading off the runway, confirming the crash was a runway mishap.

I would guess that the Google Earth image “update” was actually a regression in time, and the second photo shows the plane before it had been dismantled (probably to clear it away).