The Register wrote about a strange military installation in the remote village of Huangyangtan in China, found by the Google Earth community:
Zooming in for a closer look, we have what appears to be a 900x700m scale model of a mountainous landscape......complete with lakes, valleys and snow-capped peaks.
It's clear that a huge amount of time and resources has been invested in this perplexing scale model, which incidentally represents an area of around 450 by 350 kilometers. The big question is: why?
The only sensible explanation we can come up with is that it's a training aid for pilots - possibly helicopter jockeys - designed to familiarise them with the landscape should military action ever be required.
I've seen something similar to this that was used by UK Tornado pilots before the age of computer simulation to simulate low altitude flying. It was much smaller and indoors, but involved a small camera controlled by the trainee moving across a 3 dimensional landscape scene.
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