An eagle-eyed user spotted what appeared to be a completely intact plane sitting in a clearing in the Cardwell Range, located about 155 miles south of Port Douglas on the Queensland coast. The photo could also capture the plane, which the Daily Mail said appears to be a standard Airbus A320 or Boeing 737, flying at a very low altitude, giving the impression of being on the ground. The plane appears to be completely intact. Google Maps But Australian security officials said it was likely just a bug in Google’s satellite software. “There appears to be a phenomenon called ghost images and this could be it,” Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority told the Cairns Post. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau added that it was not aware of any missing passenger aircraft. In 2016 — after a downed plane that never crashed was found at the bottom of a Minneapolis lake that appeared on Google Maps — a Google spokesperson said the satellite images displayed on the site are compilations of several images. “Fast moving objects like airplanes often appear in only one of the many images we use for a given area. When this happens, faint remnants of the fast-moving object are sometimes seen,” said Susan Cadrecha. Google has yet to confirm this is happening in Queensland.
