Google Earth - why no planes at Heathrow?

[CocoapuffPuff]

I'm just idly wandering round the world on Google earth app, and looked at Heathrow Airport. There's not a single plane at the gates. Every other airport I've looked at has dozens of planes at the terminals, but none at Heathrow.
Have they been digitally removed? If so, i wonder why? I thought Heathrow was active 24hrs, so I can't imagine there being a time when absolutely no planes were on site, and coincidentally the Google earth satellite happened to pass overhead at that exact moment...........
Just curious, it seems odd.

Weirder - I just looked and the car parks are all nearly empty too. Just an odd random vehicle here and there. The M25 is empty as well - lol.

How weird! Maybe Google just painted it in 😮

It only updates every few years, so it might be a shot from Covid period when very few planes about?

When was the photo taken? Was the Heathrow one during COVID and not been updated?

This is JFK
And LHR
Who stole the planes?

Weird

I think it's a covid picture.

Our town photo is from covid. We all had big paddling pools in the gardens.

@cakeorwine ATC's version of Hide & Seek?

And LGW

Many of the pictures are from different dates/times. These will be Covid as said above. No conspiracies here 🤣

If you play with the History button, the no plane picture is 10th April 2020.

But surely the planes were grounded in covid? Or would they be undercover?

I think they are all at Chicago

Lockdown never even occurred to me. Thanks! I naively assumed they'd update more frequently than 4, 5 years. How stoopid of me.

Planes were not grounded during covid. I flew several times during the lockdowns. Plus all the cargo and shipping flights still went on.

And if they were grounded, they’d be there parked at the airport. There aren’t enough hangers to put them all inside them.

They’ve been digitally removed from the image is my bet.

Why do the satellite images of the Avostal steel plant in Ukraine show a bombed out wrecked area, yet those of Gaza show that everything's hunky dory with no flattened areas or devastation? Funny that 🤔

That was my point, they would be in the photos.

And of course some planes flew but I’d guess significantly less than normal.

It’s this. I noticed the same a while ago and googled it and read this was the reason but I can’t remember why they do this.

Yes exactly. The only time there would be zero planes at an airport is if they are all in the air or in hangars for repair. The image has been scrubbed.

Yes, fewer planes flew during COVID, but the airports never fully shut down. That’s how Covid spread so fast and how the new variants also spread so fast.

Hmmm. The plot thickens. Bloody weird. Even itsy bitsy Edinburgh Airport has planes at the gates. I wonder why Heathrow has hidden them.

A load were moved to Bristol I think? Somewhere west country.

Although Gatwick were all parked up at the rear of the airport because we could see from our office and it was so sad.

It's weird though - if you see here, there's different shades of green around Crawley / Gatwick, see below Pease Pottage. Zoom in and there's cars on the A23/M23 and suddenly the lighting changes and no cars at all!

Manchester Airport has planes. But not Gatwick or Heathrow.

I don't think Covid is the explanation.
I remember during the empty skies after 9/11 reading somewhere that there aren't actually enough parking spaces at all the international airports in the world to have all the international planes on the ground at the same time - you need at least a third of them in the air at any given moment. Heathrow would not have had empty tarmac during covid. I expect they are blurred/edited out for security reasons.

If you look around the photo from April 2020, there are some planes but very few.
The general, easy to view photo is an altered version of that, easier to do to scrub the planes. Check out the building works to date the picture.

Meanwhile Easyjet moved a big bit of their fleet to Southend.
Ryan Air went to Stanstead
British airways stored excess planes at Bournemouth.

There doesn’t have to be a reason other than it looks nicer.
The different greens are normal. Google Earth is a collage of millions of satellite images stitched together like a quilt, and they aren’t going to be from the same month or day- you’re spotting where one square transitions into another.