Twin shot of same plane ?

I am not qualified to ID the plane but imagery looks goood for quad engine plane landing at Hawaii

Attachments:

2x quad engine landing 2004.kmz (853 B)

Sure - nice imagery in the region.  Why is it so good?  Because it's derived from aerial photography, rather than satellite.  As well as the (usually) better resolution, you can normally spot aerial photograpy because you can see the sides of buildings, fuel storage tanks etc.  A satellite shot is truly vertical, so you only see the very tops of buildings etc.

Another feature of aerial photography is its ability to capture multiple images of moving targets.  To see how this works, picture the target aircraft flying immediately below the photo aircraft on the same heading and at the same speed.  Every time the photo aircraft's camera fired, it would snap the ground immediately below it, and also the take a pic of the target aircraft.  A couple of seconds later, the camera fires again, takes a picture of the next bit of ground and, naturally, another pic of the target aircraft.  When the photo processing software starts to stitch all the images together, the ground will appear as a continuous strip, but there will also be a long string of images of the target aircraft.

In this case, the photo aircraft is not flying on exactly the same course as the target, but close enough to capture two shots before the target aircraft moves out of the camera field of view.  It seems that the photo aircraft is flying very slowly - it has also managed to capture 3 shots of the KC135 rolling toward the holding point .

You're right about the 4-engined aircraft - it IS landing.  You can clearly see its shadow getting closer as it approaches the ground.  The second shot shows it almost on the point of touchdown.

This aircraft is the venerable Lockheed C130 Hercules, probably the most prolific cargo aircraft in the world.  Another easy spot;  wide bodied, high-wing monoplane with 4 engines.  Leading edge of the wings at 90 degrees to the fuselage, slight taper on the trailing edge.  Tailplane equally tapered on both leading and trailing edges.  This one is unusual; in my experience the long range extra fuel tanks are normally fitted to the inboard pylons (ie, between the engines), like the 3-view below.  Your aircraft has fuel tanks fitted on the outboard stations, ie outboard of Nos 1 & 4 engines.



3-view image courtesy Wiki

Cheers,

Frank