From the Firehose: #planespotting
Like most companies today, we use Slack for a lot of our internal messaging here at Planet. We have a wide variety of channels — multiple food and cute animal related channels, a #queenbey channel—you know, the important things. But one of my favorite Slack channels we have is #planespotting. The purpose of the channel is set as ‘planes! from space!’ and we use this thread to share neat images of airplanes we find in our imagery. Take for example, this image of today’s largest passenger plane, the A380:
One of my coworkers is particularly adept at finding the planes from our images on Flightradar24 and we love to track planes’ flightpaths. The above image, for example, is Emirates flight EK 232 from Washington DC to Dubai.
We enjoy spotting planes at all stages in the Plane Circle of Life. From the Boeing Factory, in Everett, Washington:
To operational planes all across the globe. Here’s one from my last post of Boston’s Logan Airport:
And finally, planes at rest in airplane graveyards like this image of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base:
With 3–5 meter resolution, we can’t see whether or not the landing gear of a plane is down. But we are able to discern some of the more vibrant liveries such as Southwest’s signature blue and red, Spirit’s yellow, or the now defunct DHL Aviation planes at Kingman Airport’s plane graveyard in Mohave, AZ:
And of course, like any Slack channel #planespotting sometimes gets off topic and we post some interesting pictures of “planes of the sea”:
Stay tuned for a #boatspotting post in the future!
