We heard the unfortunate news today about adventurer Steve Fossett disappearing during what by accounts was a simple pleasure flight in good weather. He departed the Flying M Ranch southeast of Reno, NV in a Citabria Super Decathlon Monday morning on a local flight and did not return. The Flying M Ranch is owned by the Hilton Family of hotel fame. Finding the ranch on a map wasn’t easy - so we’ve created the simple map below showing the location of the Flying M. We suggest you view the map in Google Earth to get an appreciation for the mountainous terrain nearby.

Get the latest version of Google Earth HERE

Flying M Ranch - Switch to Hybrid Mode or use the View in Google Earth Button for best results!

Update:We appreciate the wonderful response we’ve been getting about our Airport Videos Google Earth layer below! We’ve got an inbox full of corrections, deletions, and new videos to work through thanks to your help. If you’ve saved the Airport Video layer to your ‘My Places’ folder in Google Earth, it will update automatically each time you load it.

It’s been a long time coming, but yesterday’s release of Google Earth 4.2 covered widely on the internet it is now possible to embed flash videos, such as those on YouTube into the windows version of Google Earth.

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One of the most distinctive jet fighters of all time, the F-14 Tomcat was officially retired in Navy ceremonies today. Its career spanned over 30 years since its inception in the mid-70’s. While not the 1st swing-wing US fighter, it outlived the Air Force F-111 (which at one time contented against the F-14 for Navy use) by quite a bit.

Distinctive bits of F-14 Lore:

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PlanePlaces.com Correspondant Larry Z filed the following report and photos on his attendance at MERFI 2006 held at the Marion Municipal Airport (KMRT) in central Ohio:

Wow, what a couple of years and a change of leadership can do. I just came back from the annual MERFI (Mid-Eastern Regional Fly-in) in Marion Ohio. In years past I’ve always been a little disappointed in the communications and services once you’re on the ground there. This year was just a wonderful experience.

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My dad pointed me to a very nice AirVenture photo essay posted at http://silvairehair2.home.comcast.net/072806/. Some very nice aerial imagery from their trip and around the grounds at Oshkosh AirVenture 2006.

Amazing things are being done with Google Earth. We discovered a worldwide realtime METAR feed today.

Provided by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, it maps the Aviation Digital Data Service’s (ADDS) database of over 3000 world METAR reporting stations to Google Earth. Observation data is updated every 5 minutes and they have adopted a symbol set reminiscent of older paper weather charts to quickly convey current conditions at each airport.

Download the Google KMZ file HERE.

Use the link below to get the current version of Google Earth: