How to Preview a Walking Route by Flying Through Google Earth (Yes, Really)

On 12 June, Google did something brilliant and slightly daft. It took the flight simulator that has been hidden inside Google Earth since 2007 and made it free for everyone, right in your web browser. No download, no login, no paid tier. Just open Google Earth and you can fly a plane over anywhere on the planet.

Naturally, the first thing I did was fly over Snowdon.

And once I’d stopped crashing my virtual Cessna into the side of Crib Goch, a thought occurred to me. There is a genuinely useful idea buried in all this messing about. You can, more or less, preview a walking route before you set off. So let’s talk about how to do that from your sofa, what it’s brilliant for, and the one big thing it will never tell you.

So what actually launched?

The Google Earth flight simulator isn’t new. It has been tucked away as a hidden feature in the desktop version since 2007, the sort of thing you only ever found because a mate showed you.

What changed on 12 June is that Google brought it to the web version, free, for everyone. No regional limits. No account needed.

Here’s how to find it.

1. Go to Google Earth in your browser and click Explore.

2. Click Tools, then select Flight Simulator.

3. Use the arrow keys to fly.

That’s it. Pick a spot, take off, and have a go. Fair warning: it’s built for fun, not for training airline pilots, so don’t expect a smooth ride. I like to pretend I’m in the fighter jets you see fly below you when you’re heading up the ridge on Tryfan.

Right, let’s fly over Snowdon

So I pointed my virtual plane at Yr Wyddfa and flew the line of the Llanberis path.

It is, I’ll be honest, a glorious way to lose twenty minutes. But here’s the interesting part. Even while I was bouncing off ridgelines, I was seeing something useful: the actual shape of the land.

From up there you get a feel for where the ground rears up steeply, where the ridges pinch in, and how the valleys feed into one another. That’s terrain awareness, and it’s the same thing we’re trying to read off the contour lines on a map Flying over it just makes that 3D picture obvious in a way a flat sheet of paper sometimes doesn’t, especially when you’re new to map reading.

How to preview a walking route (the genuinely useful version)

Okay, so the flight simulator is mostly a toy. But the idea behind it, seeing your route in 3D before you go, is a proper planning tool. Here’s how to actually do it.

1. Drop into Google Earth’s 3D view. Search for your hill, then tilt the view and orbit around it with your mouse. You can swing right round a mountain and look at it from every angle. This is the realistic version of “flying” your route, and it works anywhere, including the UK hills.

2. Use Street View for the start. Drop the little orange figure onto the road near where you’ll park. You can see what the car park actually looks like, where the gate or stile is, and which way the path heads off. Half the faff of a walk is finding the start, and this sorts that before you leave home.

3. Try Immersive View for Routes, if you’re near a city. This is Google’s slick new one. It fuses Street View and aerial images into a smooth 3D fly-through and lets you preview a route before you take it. The catch for us walkers: it only covers a handful of cities so far, including London, so it’s more use for the journey to the hill than the hill itself.

Used together, these are brilliant for one thing in particular: confidence. Seeing where you’re going takes a lot of the unknown out of a first walk somewhere new.

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What flying through your route won’t tell you

Here’s the catch, and it’s a big one.

A bird’s-eye fly-through makes everything look calm, dry and obvious. The real hill is none of those things.

A screen will not tell you:

– How boggy that innocent-looking green bit gets after a wet week.

– How long the walk actually takes once you factor in the climbing. (That’s a job for Naismith’s Rule, not a flyover.)

– What that ridge looks like when the cloud comes down and you can see about ten feet.

– Where the path quietly vanishes into a featureless slope and you have to make a navigation decision.

That last one is the big one. The moment the visibility drops or the path disappears, no amount of flying over it on Google Earth helps you. That’s when you need a map in your hand, a compass, and the skills to use them .

A screen is a preview. It is not the hill.

Use it as a starter, not a substitute

So, by all means, fly through your route. Orbit your hill in 3D, check the car park on Street View, get a feel for the shape of the day. It’s a genuinely good first step, and it’ll build your confidence.

But it’s the starter, not the main course. Underneath it you still need the proper planning, a route card, the right OS map, a look at the mountain weather, and an escape route or two in case things change.

If you want a simple system for all of that, the planning side is exactly what my Free Digital Prep and Planning Course walks you through, step by step. It’s free, it takes a few minutes to get started, and it turns “I flew over it once” into “I’ve actually planned this properly.”

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