Talk about all the luck. Robert Scoble takes an airplane ride somewhere and ends up scoring a couple hours with Eric Waldman who just happened to be sitting next to Scoble in the airplane.

So who’s Eric Waldman?

Well, Eric handles the licensing for Bing Maps and during the flight he shared some really cool information with Robert. Information like how Microsoft will be be flying planes over every square inch of the United States over the next 18 months to bring new high quality images to Bing Maps. Apparently they are already 10% done a project that took ten years to complete the last time an All USA flight imaging exercise took place.

We talked for the next couple of hours about the industry, and what he sees as the good things and problems. Talked about how Navteq and other companies control a lot of the data that you see in Mapquest, Google Maps, and on Bing and how Microsoft works with those companies to build unique data (Navteq’s cameras, for instance, are actually built by Microsoft and Microsoft shares a license for some of that data with Navteq).

He told me a story of how Microsoft was doing something that had never been done before: they are flying planes over nearly every inch of the United States in the next 18 months. Already 10% done. The previous “all USA” flight image gathering exercise took 10 years, he told me. There’s immense pressure on mapping teams, he told me, to always keep its data up to date.

He also made sure to point out that Microsoft’s on-car cameras are sharper than the ones Google is using and that Bing Maps includes at least four different imaging types: on road photos, 45-degree low-altitude aerial photos, high altitude plane photos, and satellite photos.

Of course it takes massive amounts of storage to keep all these images so much so that Microsoft built a five petabyte storage storage center in the back of a small shipping container in the parking lot. Not only that but Robert also got the chance to video of what the container looks like on the inside which you can see here – oh and that image at the top it is one of the early versions of Microsoft’s aerial camera.

[Editor’s Note: Microsoft’s Bing heading to the sky to map the U.S. is a post from: winextra. –mrh]