Over a year ago I saw a Hurricane fly over north Watford - needless to say everyone else thought it was a Spitfire, but the wings were too thick and 'stubby' so we had a discussion about Vulcans, SR71 and other things instead.
When I got home I decided to look on the Battle of Britain Memorial flights website (http://www.raf.mod.uk/bbmf/) to see if I could find out the answer - after emailling off a question, downloading the years flying schedule spreadsheet and poring over the entries I got a reply to confirm that it was a Hurricane.
However the spreadsheet got me thinking and I started to think of some way of making use of the published information to answer this sort of question in the future.
I found myself looking at KML files which allow Google Earth (http://www.google.com/earth/index.html) to display a range of information. After a lot of reading of the KML API and messing aroud with excel I managed to produce a working KML file (http://www.mediafire.com/?pwrk5c9sxeod688) which was enough to show that it could be done.
After a very small amount of polishing I decided to contact the BBMF and ask if they were interested in what I was doing.
After a fair bit of too-ing and fro-ing I thought I had got the idea across.
Ok - that's the start, hopefully tomorrow I can pad out the rest.
ttfn
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