I recently flew home from Houston to Los Angeles. I got myself a window seat during check in. I was pleased to find my seat had two windows. Inspired by a post by Monadi at Phone-rush, I wanted to try GPS in mid-flight for myself.

Before takeoff, I set the Nokia N82 to offline mode and then turned it off. When the pilot started talking, I first turned on my Nokia N95. It took a few minutes to get a GPS lock. I couldn’t move it around without losing the signal.

I turned the Nokia N82 on and it didn’t take long for it to get a signal. I turned on the GPS data application and got this screenshot:

Nokia N82 at high altitude

Taking a cue from the great position artist Stavros, I turned on the Sportstracker application to make some of my own position art.

I first changed a few settings. I set the units to imperial and the GPS filtering to low. I was able to keep the Nokia N82 in my shirt pocket and maintain a signal lock. I then activated the Sportstracker. Here is a map of my position art:

View Larger Map

One giant stroke across the American Southwest.

This is a detailed log of the journey at the sportstracker website. You can see some screenshots and a few pictures I took while in midflight.

It looks like I started Sportstracker at the end of the ascent portion of the flight at almost 11000 meters (36000 feet) and a speed of 846 km/hr (536 mi/hr). It began to slow down and descend quickly somewhere over San Bernadino. I turned it off as soon as the pilot said to turn off all electronic devices.

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