I wonder how hard it would be for the airlines to install a latitude/longitude display in the cabin area? I've thought of this a few times as I zip across the US peering out the window onto some alien looking landscape and not knowing where the heck we were.

I've been on many international flights and one transcontinental flight with the moving info map, which is nice, but it didn't display the airplane's coordinates, zoom in very far, or show much map detail. Seems simple enough to have some sort of lat/lon display. Heck you could even have an audio channel with the coordinates along with the current time, temp, speed, etc... droned off in text-speech like the radio channel for universal time.

A laptop mapping program or even a paper map with lat/lon coordinates is cheap enough and will allow you to roughly track where you are, especially at night when landmarks aren't available. I can spend hours on a flight trying to spot landmarks.

On my last flight from PHL->SEA the pilot just happened to announce we were mid-way over South Dakota, just passing Aberdeen. That probably didn't mean anything to the other passengers, but with that information in hand (and a fair share of luck) I was able to identify the little town of Eureka where my 99 year old Grandmother lives and where I'd spent so many summers as a child. What a thrill!

In a pinch I've done rough calculations using departure time, estimated arrival time, and current time to get the approximate longitude (forget latitude unless you know the flight path).

Putting a numeric display with the current lat/lon coordinates would do the trick. They could then publish the in-flight magazine maps with lat/lon grids on them.

Next step: auto-updating digital map overlays on the windows!

-hopeless map geek