GEOINT: finding a picture taken from a plane

Source

On February 4th, @fs0c131y shared an OSINT quizz inviting his followers to solve it. Here’s a resolution found and written by Eric B., edited by Predicta Lab.

To find where this picture was taken, we need to first find where it was first shared. Google Lens gives hundreds of results for this picture but looking at the ones with the largest size gives us the original and another early publication on Wikimedia.

Here we find the author (Eva Darron) and when the picture was taken (August 23rd, 2016 at 6:44 p.m).

The author’s LinkedIn profile informs us that she was in the New-York City area at that time. Seeing as she worked there, it is likely she travelled around that area and that the picture was taken there.

Hence we’re looking for a picture taken from a plane in August 2016 at 6:44 p.m. in the Greater New York City Area.

Because the picture is rather close to the ground, we can assume that it was taken close to landing or take off and search around local airports.

There are several results but Newark Liberty international airport seems to be the closest airports to rivers with similar winding shapes to the river we see in the picture (in blue). We will also be searching for two lakes (in yellow) to the West of the location (direction where the sun sets).

Let’s have a look at the rivers in the following area :

To help us narrow it down we can have a look at Newark airport’s landing patterns for aircrafts coming southward on Skyvector and search along the landing line.

A bit of search on Google Maps leads us to a view close to the picture around Fair Lawn : from the red line representing the plane’s trajectory, we find the curved river in the purple circle as well as the lake in the background in the blue circle.

Now to Google Earth to confirm!

We use the historical imagery function to look at satellite images dating back to 2016, just like our picture.

This confirms our geolocation at coordinates close to the followings:

40.94158613842868, -74.11914068287038