animate a 3d aircraft model to fly a flight path in google earth

[drumaero]

I've been playing with creating paths in Google Earth using KML. I am
wondering if anyone has ever imported a 3d aircraft model, and then
animated the orientation of that airplane to fly along a fixed path
with changing bank, tilt, and heading? I've found some basic
animation tools in the KML guide, and seen a video example of a plane
flying on a fixed straight light, but I am not clear how one would
provide smooth animation of tilt, roll, and heading of the 3d model?
Is this possible? Can you feed a bunch of time history airplane
orientation data using the network link function to essentially play a
tour of the airplane flying a particular flight path with bank, tilt,
and heading changes?

[Nymor]

Hi,

Here's one from a couple of years ago posted on the GE Community
boards.

http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=939384&an=

That one uses the timeline for animation. I suspect doing the same but
with the new Tour features would be even better as you could control
the camera and effectively be in the cockpit. Neither of those
approaches require network links - you can do the whole thing in one
file.

A GE plugin version would be even more flexible - something I've been
wanting to get round to myself but never seem to find the time.

Nymor

[drumaero]

Yes, thank you, that looks promising. Unfortunately, I am still
pretty new to KML and am even more green to the new Tour features.
The complication I see with the timeline method, from the example that
you posted, was that each timestep had to be written out as a separate
block of code, and there were over 200 timesteps! I was hoping that
you could read in an external file that just listed the time,
location, and orientation, so you could get some smooth motion from
the airplane from a huge number of data points (generated in Excel or
something). Maybe you could do this with the new Tour features?