July 22, 2008

Flying GPS

Last week I took a whole week off and went on a much needed R&R trip to China. I've always wondered if GPS devices could work in a commercial flight, and this was the perfect opportunity to find out for myself.

My GPS is a Garmin Forerunner 205 which actually a sports GPS, but it could be used as a general purpose GPS for tracking, but not for navigation.

The flight was between Bangkok and Beijing. The distance from take off to landing was 3,511 km and the total flight time was 4.5 hours. Max airspeed was 905 km/h. The yellow line in the image is the actual flight path taken from the Garmin software.

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