I recently stumbled across what just might be the coolest pilot software application ever: Keyhole. Well, Keyhole isn’t really intended as pilot software, but pilots are guaranteed to love it.
Keyhole-the company was acquired by Google last fall-takes a huge (20 terabytes) database of high-resolution satellite photography-some areas of the country have more detail than others-and puts it into dynamic map form, giving users the ability to zoom into an area to the point that you can see cars on the street, slightly fuzzy cars, but cars nonetheless. You can then use the tilt function to get a 3-D view of things, and you can use on-screen cursor controls to zoom around the area. The sensation is remarkable. It looks just like flying.
