I found something very interesting (yeah, yet another) with Google Earth. Using the website, Google Earth Hacks, I searched for things in Iraq… I wanted to see what cool things were visible.

This is the picture that accompanied the link to “bombed planes”…
afterplane.jpg

But when I went to look at the same location on my Google Earth, I saw this…
afterplane2.jpg

At first glance, you would think, “Well, obviously someone came by and wreaked some more havoc on the plane since the first image was taken.” Well, not so fast.

First look at the dunes on both images… the shadows are identical. In fact, everything else about the images is identical. Are you telling me that the second set of satellite images was taken at the exact same time of day? I can see by the way images are patched together in other parts of Google Earth that isn’t true.

Is the latest, more exploded, plane a Photoshop job? If so, why would Google do that?

I posed the question to the Google community and got the following suggestions:

1 – it is indeed a newer photo taken at the same time of day and the partially destroyed plane was destroyed completely as part of a coalition operation
2 – it is a Photoshop job created to hide the fact that the plane was obviously not a military plane and thus did not need to be destroyed in the first place
3 – a suicide bomber without a sense of direction got lost trying to reach the airport

I just thought it was weird.