Pardon the stupid question, but how do you see the ground from the plane window? Most of the time I'm on a plane you can't see much of the ground, not nearly enough to get good aerial view images anyway.
Plus video quality is usually pretty crappy and you'd need heaps of post-processing to stabilize the video/remove dirt spots on the window, etc. I find it difficult to believe that this would work well with random people filming with their smartphones out a plane window.
But people still capture things in the sky if there's something to see. Plenty of footage exists of low flying aircraft and meteors, for instance. People aren't looking down at their smartphones all the time, completely blind to the peripheral universe around them. And there are also dashcams, security cameras, etc, to consider.
Most planes aren’t equipped with any camera systems. The videos commercial pilots and passengers use are their phones which have trouble focusing on objects half a mile away (which is very close for an aircraft to be next to another one but very far for your phone to focus on).
Military pilots do have camera systems like the ATFLIR pods on F-18s but the pentagon only declassifies those videos when it’s useful - like when the Chinese jet made an American military plan fly through its fumes recently
Blurry photos do not stop people from posting them in many other cases. Planes do not have to be equipped as such: there's so many people flying with GoPro-s and similar recording all the time that we'd get something popping up all the time.
And that's even if we ignore the claim that people repeatedly see something. If I was a pilot and spotted something weird more than once, I'd make sure I record every flight from then on - can't imagine not doing it.
A couple years ago, a guy used an RC plane to record a video of a New York flyover, including the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. The police were pretty cool about it.
https://blog.google/topics/inside-google/google-earths-incre...
Too bad it's a video. Fast forward about 2 minutes.
Or: https://youtu.be/suo_aUTUpps?t=121
Fly plane. Zig zag. 5 cameras, then photogrammetry. StreetView, from planes.
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