Pilots everywhere are required to keep a logbook of all their flying hours, aircraft, airports, and so on. Since I track everything digitally (some people still just use paper logbooks!), I put together some data visualizations and a few 3D globes to show my flying history.
This globe is probably my favourite so far: https://jameshard.ing/pilot/globes/all
If you’ve got ideas for other graphs or ways to show this kind of data, I’d love to hear them!
Due the the Ukraine war (and my home base being in the UK), we have to fly the long way around to get to far-east destinations like Tokyo and Hong Kong. Flying outbound from London we have to fly down over Turkey (which adds about two hours of flight time).
Flying home from Tokyo with the ongoing airspace closure, if the the weather is suitable at the ETOPS airports enroute, it is actually quicker to fly home eastbound again, flying up over Alaska. A proper around-the-world in 4 days!
I still (hopefully evidently) very much love software/engineering, but I guess I chose the path of "professional pilot, hobbyist engineer" over the alternative of "professional engineer, hobbyist pilot".
At what age did you make this change?
I love medicine, researching diseases I hear about and learning about the body is hobby for me. I would love to get into it but I am almost 40.
You're young! Saying that as a fellow almost-40.
Both pay well for a job, but as a hobby the costs are very different ;-)
Second question. Would it be possible to predict flight delays based on the number of inbound and outbound flights?
I travel NY/LON a lot, and I rarely have any ear popping. If I travel on a smaller plane say NY -> Miami, I easily get the clogged feeling.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/1728/does-the-b...
When there's missiles in the air heading to land on innocent babies, the airlines choose waypoints so that they don't fly over these areas.
While not exact prohibited airspace, this map shows where GPS jamming is highest, which roughly corresponds to the warzones: https://gpsjam.org/
The globe map reminds me of this hexagonal grid article from my bookmarks I’d found on here or reddit.
https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/
As an airline pilot, I am curious, have you watched the season 2 of Nathan Fielder’s Rehearsal on HBO, that comically addresses the topic of pilot-copilot communication?
If so what are your thoughts on his portrayal of the existence of copilot communication friction. And without intending to dig into your personal business, do you think there is a tendency and survivor (retention) bias for the profession to remain high functioning ______, without recognizing a need for help. Or is this portrayal of stunted coworker dialog an edge case that is amplified from his perspective.
He answered in the post that he uses LogTen Pro[1] which enables querying with SQL[2]. In the SQL post he says the app has an export for CSV but the app stores it in SQLite which you can access and query from directly.
[1] https://logten.com/ [2] https://jameshard.ing/posts/querying-logten-pilot-logbook-sq...
I have only seen a few clips from The Rehersal (the bit with Sully listening to Evanescence), so I don't have much to go on. Pilot communication is definitely something that we spend a lot of time talking about and training (under the larger banner of CRM - crew resource management), and in my experience the industry is making real efforts to be better in this area!
It's been over a decade, but it's cool to see that software still being iterated on and pilots still loving it.
Even cooler to see someone such as yourself extending its usefulness by leveraging the data. Cheers!
You can tell that the software is created by people passionate about aviation (and also passionate about nice UX, something that most all of the Logten competitors really lack). Do you remember if my guess about using NSDate internally was correct?
What's your favorite thing to see up in the sky and in the clouds?
I think that seeing the northern lights (quite common on our flights to west-coast North America) or large thunderstorms over the equator at night (from a safe distance) are probably the highlights for me :) SpaceX launches are becoming more regular occurrences too!
For an idea - anything you could do with altitude? Your average height above sea level per day? I dunno :p
General relativity works against the Special Relativity in this case.
Otherwise, maybe you can get Claude to vibe code you a mobile app that runs in the background and collects all the interesting data (GPS, cabin alt, etc)
Something pilots can link to from their LinkedIn accounts.
And of course to impress friends and family.
Do the developers of the libraries he used count this site as a personal accomplishment? Do the airplane mechanics? Do their support engineers?
We participate in a circulatory economy, but we haven't yet adopted a perspective of circulatory attribution. Maybe we never will. Maybe we never should.
Maybe you should recognize your piecemeal contributions as a sort of ikigai, or maybe you should see this as a wakeup call to carpe diem.
Thanks for the opportunity to pontificate!
This made me think. Either Frauenhofer or Helmholtz in Germany used to have a site where you could enter your specific flights and it would tell you your overall radiation exposure. This was meant mainly for flight personnel and it was not nearly as beautiful. The accumulated exposure would be a useful addition for the dashboard.
The company that I work for does actually provide us with our cumulative dosage data for the month/year/lifetime, but not at such a granular level. Do you know of any statistical way that I could calculate this?
I suppose I could work out the great circle routes and the approximate dosage in that airspace at a given time?
Do you expect to get 100% of the way to the sun over your career?
That flight was the return from Tokyo (RJTT) to London (EGLL). Due to the closure of Russian airspace, the outbound flight is longer than pre-war as we fly over Turkish airspace. Due to the wind patterns, it is almost always longer flying westbound, so we usually fly east both ways.
In this case, the weather at one of the ETOPS alternates that we use (Shemya, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eareckson_Air_Station) was out of limits, so we had to fly back Westbound with the associated headwind and longer flight time.
It is interactive, so you can filter by any dimension, like the types of aircraft you fly.
It is 2D, but I thought about making it 3D as well.
PS. The map you showed is somewhat slow - when I zoom in, the framerate is less than 10.
Glad to have found someone else with a similar background who decided to fly jets.
I had a good run as a software engineer and executive for the last 20 years. I have just completed my Airbus 320 type rating waiting for my base check. I will be flying for a national flag carrier.
I moved from the A320 to the A350 just over two years ago, and they are remarkably similar to fly (by design)! I would go so far as saying that you could hop in the A350 sim with zero training, and you would be able to operate it to a safe standard.
I've got two possible progression tracks from here: 1. gain experience on the A320 for a year, get upgraded to the A330, after two years get certified for the A350 to fly A330/A350 mixed. 2. spend years on A320, upgrade to captain, many more years, then finally upgrade to A330 as captain, then two years later A350 added.
I am planning to fly jump seat to see all the types we're flying.
Regarding ideas, I noticed that you use great circle distance in some of your measurements, what about getting the actual flight data, and the graph showing deviation of your flight from the ideal.
It would be great to use the actual distances (and would help me lap the moon a few more times), but there is no easy way to get the data. Our company flight plans which contain the actual route are in PDF format and with no easy API, and EuroControl (who hold the filed flight plans) charge quite a bit to have access I believe. I supposed I could screenshot the route and upload it to my server and have it OCR the route!
I was looking into pilot school here and they cost upwards to $100k
The current cadet scheme is better in the sense that you do not have to take on a personal loan for the flight training!
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/service...
Qualifications to join the Air Cadets. https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/service...
As for your flying, I just wanted to tell you good luck, we're all counting on you
Make an App out of it, sell it to your colleagues? why not?
All you need to do is throw in some Rust and a custom PCB or two and you have an HN bingo. :)
Sweet hack.
As someone concerned with these matters — developing SpinStep, a quaternion-based library for modeling orientation and vector state evolution in physical systems — I found myself unexpectedly inspired by your data. It got me thinking: could these kinds of spatiotemporal logs, with their emphasis on direction, roles, and environmental influences, be approached through something like rotational state modeling?
For example:
.Aircraft headings and orientation changes could map naturally to quaternions.
.Role transitions (e.g. P1 ↔ P2) resemble discrete state changes within a continuous system.
.Wind effects or flight network patterns might even be modeled as external fields influencing orientation over time.
I hadn’t envisioned SpinStep in this context, but your log offered a compelling perspective. Whether or not it leads to something concrete, I just wanted to thank you for the inspiration.
.https://github.com/VoxleOne/SpinStep/blob/main/README.md \
.https://github.com/VoxleOne/SpinStep/blob/main/docs/01-ratio...
GCMap can plot a line between any two IATA airport codes; actually you can put arbitrary number of pairs comma separated; and best of all, they can be passed as a URL param. For example: `JFK-LHR,LHR-CDG,CDG-FRA`
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=JFK-LHR,LHR-CDG,CDG-FRA
I track my own flights by sending an email to myself with a GCMap URL every now and then.
Does it make you nervous when you have to land in a new place for the first time?
alabhyajindal•5h ago
jamesharding•4h ago
A lot of people still use paper (and fill it in after landing each flight), but there are quite a few digital options on the market now. I use one called LogTen, which stores everything in a SQLite file behind the scenes which is what I used to make this.
pinoy420•4h ago
sokoloff•4h ago