Exercise: Tracking a Flight

At any given moment there are thousands of commercial airliners in the air. Tracking a flight opens up a number of possible lessons in math and geography. This exercise will show you how to track a flight in Google Earth.

Go to Southwest Airlines and find a route that goes over some interesting parts of the US.
Once you've chosen a starting and ending city, find a flight that will be in the air for at least the next hour. Write down the flight number.
Launch Google Earth
Go to the FBOWeb Site and type the flight number in where it says "Track a Specifc Flight".
Click on "track it". Google Earth should start following the flight. After the file downloads you can do one of two things: respond to the dialog box by telling it to open the file with Google Earth, or save the file and change the extension to .kml instead of .aspx. (Check this page if an error occurs.)

Now watch your flight as it unfolds. Think of the tasks you could give a student while the plane flies along. Count the lakes, name the mountains and towns, note interesting landforms, write an account as if you were on that flight. There are lots of possibilities.