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.
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!
Hey! I used to work for the company that makes that logbook software. That was a great job. The CEO was an amateur pilot himself and really, really loved software product design.
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?
"passionate about aviation" and "passionate about nice UX" definitely described Noah and the rest of the team!
Honestly, I don't remember Re: NSDate. It was many jobs and Dante's levels of burnout ago. :-)
What I remember from that time was a lot of fighting with Apple's early iCloud syncing. Because it had a habit of being incredibly fraught and flakey using SQLite-backed Core Data stuff.
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.
Very cool. I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed reading through your detailed flight logs — the way you’ve documented your experience, from distances and time in the air to the nuances of roles (P1, P2, PICUS), was fascinating.
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.
Folks like you (expert in multiple domains) are an inspiration for people like me. I always dream to do something other than my day job. Hope I push through my laziness to do it some day !
Sometimes I wish software development didn’t pay so exceptionally well. I’m interested in so many other things, but it’s hard to justify switching to another full-time field, knowing it would mean a significant pay cut.
I wish I wasn't medically barred from having a pilot's license. Not for the pay, but I just like the idea of flying. Unfortunately, I cannot. I recommend people use their salaries to learn how to fly regardless! It's maybe ~$15-20k to get a PPL which is doable for the tech crowd with some planning.
That is beautiful. Besides the globe and the cool animations I like the dashboard that shows summary stats.
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?
Amazing visualization. Any plans to add more features to each log? e.g. difficulty of taking-off/flying to/landing, or trajectory with/out turbulence, etc.?
Thank you! I have text comments/remarks for all particularly memorable flights (for all of the above reasons you mentioned, plus famous passengers, family on board, etc), but some of those are quite private and also difficult to show in a visualisation like this.
I would love to track more data over time, but balancing that with it being easy to collect is the challenge!
Very neat, something that would be cool to see is the commercial vs GA split over time. In your graph by type it’s quite hard to see how much flying you still do on your own time!
I do actually have my GA flying included in this data, it’s just pretty minimal these days! GA flying is very expensive in the UK.
I still fly our family airplane when I am home in Canada, but it only amounts to a few hours a year. You can see the flight time for “7KCAB” very slowly trickling up in the cumulative time graph at the bottom.
Looks great, thanks for sharing! One thing I love about software engineering is that you can apply it to so many different aspects of ordinary life. Showing your flight career like this is really cool.
It’s not a 9-5 for many and time between flights can be significant. Not surprised they do that as a hobby on the side. Not imagining they’re doing anything during the flight.
do pilots get to mess around on a laptop while flying? My understanding is that most of a flight is just sitting there waiting for landing to start, could mean a lot of spare time to pick up programming
I don’t think the cognitive context switching required would be a good fit. I imagine pilots always have to be “on” just in case something happens, even if they are letting the plane do some of the routine flying.
Nice metrics and visualizations! The kind of graph you used for the destination matrix doesn't always feel very useful, but in this case it worked really well.
One thing I immediately thought to check after seeing your hours graph was what percentage of the year you were in flight (or in a plane, I guess). For your peak year (2024), it worked out to be about 8.7% of the year! It probably even higher if you just count your waking hours, but I don't know your sleep habits or how many of your flights you might have slept during.
It is one of the pecularities of the job, in that I will be "at work" for 4 days, but only actually strapped into an airplane for 8-14 hours at the beginning and end of that - the rest is mandated (and much needed) resting.
If you're interested in the subject, let me introduce you to GCMap.
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`
GCMap doesn't have a whole lot of different map projections to choose from. Having more than one pair on a single map will result in a pretty bad map projection. That's my biggest complaint. They really need to add more better projections such as Mollweide, Winkel Tripel, Robinson, etc. Or they should just have a globe.
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.
You are only required to log time required for 61.51.a.1 or .a.2, but are not required to log “all [your] flying hours” by the FAA. (Your airline might require it and it’s a good idea to log all your flights, but it’s not a law.)
That's fascinating! Have you thought about sharing your data visualization methods with other pilots? It could help improve safety communication and training.
just out of sick curiosity...something about flights with ill-behaved fliers. Ultimately, as one who does not work in the airline business and has flown often, how often are pilots and staff perturbed by customers?
Do you have any takes on the performance and quality of ATC systems across your most frequent routes? Have you noticed any patterns in terms of delays, communication efficiency and related..
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 my eyes on the A350 for ages now so I'm glad that I landed on the Airbus fleet (80/20 odds in favour of Boeing here at my airline).
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.
May I ask which airline you fly for? Feel free to email me if you like (email is on the website!) if you'd rather not post it in public :)
Career progression in airlines is interesting - with lifestyle being so heavily influenced by seniority at most airlines, there is often a big tradeoff decision to make between lifestyle and salary.
At my current airline, the most well-trodden career progression has historically always been Short-haul FO -> Long-haul FO -> Short-haul Captain -> Long-haul Captain. Curious if this is the same at other airlines?
Very cool. One nit is because of the graph smoothing, it looks like you have negative hours P2 time 2014-2015 and Heavy time 2021-2022.
I thought the ICAO "Heavy" designation applied to aircraft above a certain MTOW instead of time? Wouldn't the time designation be as acting as relief captain/FO?
The term "Heavy" (for wake separation) in the ICAO context is 100% based on MTOW! In the context of this graph, these are flights where we carry 3 or 4 pilots, and I am not in the seat for takeoff or landing. We still operate at the control during the middle of the flight when the other pilots are on their rest break. Not sure where the name "Heavy" came from here, but is it just the term used at my airline (and probably others? Some use "relief crew")
Good call on the data smoothing - I will look into a fix for this!
There seems to be some crossover between the software and flying 'communities'. Perhaps this is rather unsurprising given some of the shared prerequisite skills? Is it your experience there are many commercial pilots who code?
Do you expect to get 100% of the way to the sun over your career?
There are quite a few ex-engineers who fly (though anecdotally, most seemed to have studied aerospace engineering. At this rate, I think I am on track to make it about 10% of the way there by the time I retire (unless supersonic travel comes back in a large way!)
Very cool! As a semi-frequent flyer I am also passionate about logging every flight I have taken. I have been using OpenFlights for the last five years but the constant bugs always bugged me :) This year I finally decided to build my own: https://jetsetter.quest
I would plot the destination matrix as a jeatap where each row is a departure and each column an arrival and color is the number of trips. Additionally, you could cluster the rows and columns of this heatmap.
So cool! I assumed that pilots just generally flew the same hops back and forth over and over, but it seems at first glance that there is actually a lot of variety.
Does it make you nervous when you have to land in a new place for the first time?
I guess the variety of flights is based on which aircraft one flies! I flew the A320 for the first 6 years, which covered all of Europe and a little bit of North Africa (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan). Now flying the A350, there is more of the world unlocked, but there are still some routes that only other aircraft (777/787/A380) fly at my company.
We have comprehensive company data for each airport that we operate to, and some of the more challenging airports have special training (in the simulator) as a requirement, or a video briefing. Nervous would be the wrong word, but it is always exciting to fly somewhere new!
Just map your device's location services. It'll be telling just how much someone that gained access to your device could tell about you. Or how much theGoog is making from knowing that data
My IT career is rather nowhere, my glider training terminated before going solo, at least have equally cool domain. Good to know someone is succeeding overall in all these, haha. Entertaining post and engaging data presentation!
I wish I had the data! Likewise, collecting the number of passengers carried would be a nice cumulative statistic at the end of my career (I guess I can start recording this when I become a Captain?)
You could (probably) pull the ADSB data for a "representative" flight on given routes and use that to at least get close - probably would still be useful for things like radiation exposure mentioned elsewhere.
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)
I’ll second this idea. Keeping track of your hours on high altitude is important sine you get more radiation than us on the ground. I’ve read various articles about pilots & flight attendants health affected by higher exposure to radiation.
Air Cadets appears to be a part of the Canadian Armed Forces and intended to provide an on-ramp for young people interested in different aspects of the Armed Forces (Army, flying, Naval.)
Exactly this. When I joined, the company offered a cadet scheme where the company would underwrite the loan required for your pilot training (84,000 GBP in 2016), and then that amount was repaid to us over 84 months of employment (while on a reduced cadet salary). It essentially spread the cost of training out over 7 years.
The current cadet scheme is better in the sense that you do not have to take on a personal loan for the flight training!
This is great work! I have a somewhat off-topic question. How are your ears? Do pilots have any tricks to save their ears from getting clogged due to the constant pressure changes?
Second question. Would it be possible to predict flight delays based on the number of inbound and outbound flights?
Thank you :) I haven't had issue with my ears (other than the occasional lingering cold), but usually a good yawn or chewing gum will clear it. On a normal day, I am fortunate to have wide eustacian tubes I guess!
I had always been interested in aviation, and I was fortunate that I was in the right place at the right time after graduation to join an airline on a sponsored "cadet scheme".
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".
I'm surprised how wide the acceptance age range is for BA's program (18-55). Is it common for people to transfer from unrelated careers? Nice to know that door isn't technically shut for a while!
Love Home Assistant! I have a screen on my split flap display that shows aircraft flying overhead our house (at very high level) - all fed by home assistant and various HACS addons.
This is great data visualization of interesting data! I'm curious about the last graph; there seems to be something making some of the longest flights take more time/nm. Is that real or an artifact, and is there an explanation for the tail?
Great question! It is not an anomaly, it is very geographically specific.
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!
So for London-Tokyo the return route is completely different from the outbound route? Fascinating! I guess that has something to do with the jetstream (which only helps you when travelling eastbound)?
Cool, the data visualization is really neat!
Do you have a lot of down time during those long flights and are you able to work on this during that time?
Thank you! Not so much during the flight, but I bring my laptop on most trips, and I use some of the 24-48 hours we get between flights to try to be productive. It helps when I am awake at 2AM (PST) when it is 10AM on my body clock!
when a route doesn't come back as a roundtrip , like you fly LHR > HKG but not the return . how does that usually get handled on your end? do you deadhead back, get reassigned regionally or wait out a layover cycle?
Good question! There are a few routes in my data where the outbound and inbound sectors don't match for this exact reason. Since almost all of our flights begin and end at LHR, if a flight is cancelled we either operate the flight the following day, or fet "positioned" (our word for deadhead) home as a passenger.
Usually when a route changes aircraft, there is a requirement to "position" some pilots out a few days before as passengers to bring the aircraft home when it lands there for the first time. Logistically, very complex!
I'm curious to know what is the small concentrated cluster of flights Northwest of Dulles airport, where the flight durations seem way too high compared to the effective distance between the points.
Those are all of my flights in light aircraft around my hometown in Canada! They fly a little bit slower than the A350 :) There is a similar cluster around the south of Spain where I completed my Commercial/ATPL training.
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!
Slightly biased, but right now I am really enjoying the A350!
There are a few "gadgets" that really improve the QoL for pilots (moving map on the ground, camera in the tail for taxiing on the ground, much improved safety systems for situations like blocked pitot tubes, etc).
Thank you! This was all by hand using Astro, but I have steated experimenting with using AI coding for my newest project (https://liberateloyalty.com/). I have just been using ChatGPT and Copilot so far, and I am totally sold on their helpfulness.
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.
How cool! At the end of the movie "Braveheart", the narrator describes his fellows as "warrior poets" - basically the ideal Scottish man. I think that "design-literate pilot" is a reasonable modern version of at least one ideal type of person to be. Congratulations!
Love this work. Is this something you can share with your partner in the cockpit often? Would you say you are more of a First Officer Blunt, or a Captain Allears?
I'm flying your most recent route next month(ba218). If I see you I'm going to say something weird, like "I know where you've been flying James". I hope that's okay.
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.
Haha, if there is another James flying the plane, they might be spooked! I'm not flying to Denver for until at least August based on my current roster.
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!
On the long flights where we carry more than two pilots, we have allocated break time away from the cockpit. During those breaks, you can do whatever you like (sleep, watch a film, read a book, etc). I tend to try to sleep on the plane, but I always bring my laptop on trips to work on projects while downroute. Especially on west-coast trips with the 8 hours timezone change, I am usually awake at 2am which is great for being productive!
I'm jealous - all that time sitting around to get something productive done, and I can't concentrate at all because I can't relax, the plane suddenly shakes and distracts me, and it feels like I'm lacking oxygen and am not thinking clearly. I remember trying to code some stupid iterator thing in Rust for a few hours and couldn't crack it. On the ground it was solved in like 10 minutes.
Your handle is "supportengineer". Presumably you outrank OP if you count assists, or a share of others' successes.
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.
I’m also not sure how much sense it makes to talk about the personal carbon footprint of a pilot flying for their job, in terms of “could they make decisions that would change how much is released”
Cool visualization for your personal logbook. How is the raw or display data stored?
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.
The data is all in a sqlite file from my logbook software! I wrote a little post about extracting the data here: 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!
Hey! I used to work for the company that makes that logbook software. That was a great job. The CEO was an amateur pilot himself and really, really loved software product design.
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!
Awesome!
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?
"passionate about aviation" and "passionate about nice UX" definitely described Noah and the rest of the team!
Honestly, I don't remember Re: NSDate. It was many jobs and Dante's levels of burnout ago. :-)
What I remember from that time was a lot of fighting with Apple's early iCloud syncing. Because it had a habit of being incredibly fraught and flakey using SQLite-backed Core Data stuff.
Cool, thank you for the response and details.
> How is the raw or display data stored?
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 assumed the globe was using Uber's H3 library for the hexagons.
Reminds me of https://youtu.be/1SKDvQzcasg which is quite old.
Very cool. I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed reading through your detailed flight logs — the way you’ve documented your experience, from distances and time in the air to the nuances of roles (P1, P2, PICUS), was fascinating.
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...
The repo reads a bit LLM written.
Quaternions have some nice properties for some operations with 3D rotations, but they are not a panacea.
Folks like you (expert in multiple domains) are an inspiration for people like me. I always dream to do something other than my day job. Hope I push through my laziness to do it some day !
Sometimes I wish software development didn’t pay so exceptionally well. I’m interested in so many other things, but it’s hard to justify switching to another full-time field, knowing it would mean a significant pay cut.
Depending on your locale and position, you may have it backwards. Check out pilot pay in the United States at www.airlinepilotcentral.com
I wish I wasn't medically barred from having a pilot's license. Not for the pay, but I just like the idea of flying. Unfortunately, I cannot. I recommend people use their salaries to learn how to fly regardless! It's maybe ~$15-20k to get a PPL which is doable for the tech crowd with some planning.
My heart bleeds.
What a kind comment :) Thank you!
That is beautiful. Besides the globe and the cool animations I like the dashboard that shows summary stats.
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.
A great idea!
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?
Nomadlist had (has?) radiation exposure for all of your trips too, I was shocked when I saw the stats!
Amazing visualization. Any plans to add more features to each log? e.g. difficulty of taking-off/flying to/landing, or trajectory with/out turbulence, etc.?
Thank you! I have text comments/remarks for all particularly memorable flights (for all of the above reasons you mentioned, plus famous passengers, family on board, etc), but some of those are quite private and also difficult to show in a visualisation like this.
I would love to track more data over time, but balancing that with it being easy to collect is the challenge!
Very neat, something that would be cool to see is the commercial vs GA split over time. In your graph by type it’s quite hard to see how much flying you still do on your own time!
I do actually have my GA flying included in this data, it’s just pretty minimal these days! GA flying is very expensive in the UK.
I still fly our family airplane when I am home in Canada, but it only amounts to a few hours a year. You can see the flight time for “7KCAB” very slowly trickling up in the cumulative time graph at the bottom.
Oh cool, neat plane to have! And on desktop that's definitely easier to see than on mobile.
I have a similar visualization on top of ~150 billion data points of ADS-B data: https://adsb.exposed/
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.
Looks great, thanks for sharing! One thing I love about software engineering is that you can apply it to so many different aspects of ordinary life. Showing your flight career like this is really cool.
It is so true! This XKCD comic always comes to mind though with projects like this: https://xkcd.com/1205/
Being a professional pilot while also being able to put together such a polished software project like this is incredibly impressive
It’s not a 9-5 for many and time between flights can be significant. Not surprised they do that as a hobby on the side. Not imagining they’re doing anything during the flight.
do pilots get to mess around on a laptop while flying? My understanding is that most of a flight is just sitting there waiting for landing to start, could mean a lot of spare time to pick up programming
I don’t think the cognitive context switching required would be a good fit. I imagine pilots always have to be “on” just in case something happens, even if they are letting the plane do some of the routine flying.
When you're 8 hours deep in borrow checker hell, you're in no emotional state to be piloting the A380.
Or the contrary: nothing can shake you anymore
Sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_188 (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzmeGS29nu8)
He graduated from UofT with a major in CompSci.
Nice metrics and visualizations! The kind of graph you used for the destination matrix doesn't always feel very useful, but in this case it worked really well.
One thing I immediately thought to check after seeing your hours graph was what percentage of the year you were in flight (or in a plane, I guess). For your peak year (2024), it worked out to be about 8.7% of the year! It probably even higher if you just count your waking hours, but I don't know your sleep habits or how many of your flights you might have slept during.
You did the math! Thank you :)
It is one of the pecularities of the job, in that I will be "at work" for 4 days, but only actually strapped into an airplane for 8-14 hours at the beginning and end of that - the rest is mandated (and much needed) resting.
You could turn this into a product!
Something pilots can link to from their LinkedIn accounts.
And of course to impress friends and family.
If you're interested in the subject, let me introduce you to GCMap.
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.
GCMap doesn't have a whole lot of different map projections to choose from. Having more than one pair on a single map will result in a pretty bad map projection. That's my biggest complaint. They really need to add more better projections such as Mollweide, Winkel Tripel, Robinson, etc. Or they should just have a globe.
Why are airline pilots considered cool, while bus drivers are essential infrastructure, but do basically the same job — getting people from A to B?
Put me behind the wheel of a bus and I'm pretty sure I could get it somewhere safely.
Very cool! I didn't know pilots are required to maintain a logbook. What's the official recommendation for this - using a paper logbook?
Each country has slightly different requirements! For the US, here is the FAA rule for it: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
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.
What happens if you lose it?
You are only required to log time required for 61.51.a.1 or .a.2, but are not required to log “all [your] flying hours” by the FAA. (Your airline might require it and it’s a good idea to log all your flights, but it’s not a law.)
That's fascinating! Have you thought about sharing your data visualization methods with other pilots? It could help improve safety communication and training.
just out of sick curiosity...something about flights with ill-behaved fliers. Ultimately, as one who does not work in the airline business and has flown often, how often are pilots and staff perturbed by customers?
Awesome data and perspective!
Do you have any takes on the performance and quality of ATC systems across your most frequent routes? Have you noticed any patterns in terms of delays, communication efficiency and related..
Inspiring profile with beautiful charts.
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.
Congratulations, and thank you!
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 my eyes on the A350 for ages now so I'm glad that I landed on the Airbus fleet (80/20 odds in favour of Boeing here at my airline).
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.
May I ask which airline you fly for? Feel free to email me if you like (email is on the website!) if you'd rather not post it in public :)
Career progression in airlines is interesting - with lifestyle being so heavily influenced by seniority at most airlines, there is often a big tradeoff decision to make between lifestyle and salary.
At my current airline, the most well-trodden career progression has historically always been Short-haul FO -> Long-haul FO -> Short-haul Captain -> Long-haul Captain. Curious if this is the same at other airlines?
Very cool. One nit is because of the graph smoothing, it looks like you have negative hours P2 time 2014-2015 and Heavy time 2021-2022.
I thought the ICAO "Heavy" designation applied to aircraft above a certain MTOW instead of time? Wouldn't the time designation be as acting as relief captain/FO?
In any case, great visualizations.
The term "Heavy" (for wake separation) in the ICAO context is 100% based on MTOW! In the context of this graph, these are flights where we carry 3 or 4 pilots, and I am not in the seat for takeoff or landing. We still operate at the control during the middle of the flight when the other pilots are on their rest break. Not sure where the name "Heavy" came from here, but is it just the term used at my airline (and probably others? Some use "relief crew")
Good call on the data smoothing - I will look into a fix for this!
I wonder if you can spread out the airport labels a bit when they're clustered together, like the cluster around CYOO in the US.
Good idea! Not sure exactly how to do this with globe.gl but I will look into it.
There seems to be some crossover between the software and flying 'communities'. Perhaps this is rather unsurprising given some of the shared prerequisite skills? Is it your experience there are many commercial pilots who code?
Do you expect to get 100% of the way to the sun over your career?
There are quite a few ex-engineers who fly (though anecdotally, most seemed to have studied aerospace engineering. At this rate, I think I am on track to make it about 10% of the way there by the time I retire (unless supersonic travel comes back in a large way!)
Very cool! As a semi-frequent flyer I am also passionate about logging every flight I have taken. I have been using OpenFlights for the last five years but the constant bugs always bugged me :) This year I finally decided to build my own: https://jetsetter.quest
I would plot the destination matrix as a jeatap where each row is a departure and each column an arrival and color is the number of trips. Additionally, you could cluster the rows and columns of this heatmap.
This would be pretty cool for Flight Simulator fans too!
So cool! I assumed that pilots just generally flew the same hops back and forth over and over, but it seems at first glance that there is actually a lot of variety.
Does it make you nervous when you have to land in a new place for the first time?
I guess the variety of flights is based on which aircraft one flies! I flew the A320 for the first 6 years, which covered all of Europe and a little bit of North Africa (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan). Now flying the A350, there is more of the world unlocked, but there are still some routes that only other aircraft (777/787/A380) fly at my company.
We have comprehensive company data for each airport that we operate to, and some of the more challenging airports have special training (in the simulator) as a requirement, or a video briefing. Nervous would be the wrong word, but it is always exciting to fly somewhere new!
How did you make the world not pick up a geometric phase as you move it around? It's always oriented nicely.
The https://github.com/vasturiano/globe.gl library seems to use this as the default
This is inspiring me to collect more of my own data -- great job!
Just map your device's location services. It'll be telling just how much someone that gained access to your device could tell about you. Or how much theGoog is making from knowing that data
My IT career is rather nowhere, my glider training terminated before going solo, at least have equally cool domain. Good to know someone is succeeding overall in all these, haha. Entertaining post and engaging data presentation!
See https://RTEdge.net too, if you like globes with interactive nodes and edges!
I love the sequential globe especially!
For an idea - anything you could do with altitude? Your average height above sea level per day? I dunno :p
I wish I had the data! Likewise, collecting the number of passengers carried would be a nice cumulative statistic at the end of my career (I guess I can start recording this when I become a Captain?)
You could (probably) pull the ADSB data for a "representative" flight on given routes and use that to at least get close - probably would still be useful for things like radiation exposure mentioned elsewhere.
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)
I’ll second this idea. Keeping track of your hours on high altitude is important sine you get more radiation than us on the ground. I’ve read various articles about pilots & flight attendants health affected by higher exposure to radiation.
True, but is it counterbalanced by their ageing at least a few microseconds more slowly thanks to spending so much time closer to the speed of light?
You actually age faster on an airplane, because you are in a less dense space and experience less gravitational redshift.
General relativity works against the Special Relativity in this case.
Well shucks to my high school physics teacher
If I understand OP journey, was he fortunate to have been scholarship to fund his studies to become a pilot?
I was looking into pilot school here and they cost upwards to $100k
Air Cadets appears to be a part of the Canadian Armed Forces and intended to provide an on-ramp for young people interested in different aspects of the Armed Forces (Army, flying, Naval.)
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/service...
Qualifications to join the Air Cadets. https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/service...
Exactly this. When I joined, the company offered a cadet scheme where the company would underwrite the loan required for your pilot training (84,000 GBP in 2016), and then that amount was repaid to us over 84 months of employment (while on a reduced cadet salary). It essentially spread the cost of training out over 7 years.
The current cadet scheme is better in the sense that you do not have to take on a personal loan for the flight training!
And what of you failed the final examination? Could you try more than once? Would that have affected your hireability at the company?
This is great work! I have a somewhat off-topic question. How are your ears? Do pilots have any tricks to save their ears from getting clogged due to the constant pressure changes?
Second question. Would it be possible to predict flight delays based on the number of inbound and outbound flights?
Thank you :) I haven't had issue with my ears (other than the occasional lingering cold), but usually a good yawn or chewing gum will clear it. On a normal day, I am fortunate to have wide eustacian tubes I guess!
Not a pilot but fly frequently -- A lot of the modern larger planes 787 Dreamliner or an A330/350 have something that helps with the ear clogging.
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.
The newer planes pressurize their cabin to a lower simulated altitude.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/1728/does-the-b...
The logbook is nice, but the split-flap display is downright awesome. ;)
https://jameshard.ing/projects/split-flap
Glad you like it! I have a screen on there which shows my flights live while airborne - maybe worth a post of its own :)
Having a computer engineering background, what motivated you to become a pilot and switch careers?
I had always been interested in aviation, and I was fortunate that I was in the right place at the right time after graduation to join an airline on a sponsored "cadet scheme".
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".
>> chose the path of "professional pilot, hobbyist engineer" over the alternative of "professional engineer, hobbyist pilot"
Both pay well for a job, but as a hobby the costs are very different ;-)
I loved programming before doing it as a job. Now, I really can't be bothered to program outside of work.
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.
> I would love to get into it but I am almost 40.
You're young! Saying that as a fellow almost-40.
I'm surprised how wide the acceptance age range is for BA's program (18-55). Is it common for people to transfer from unrelated careers? Nice to know that door isn't technically shut for a while!
Looking at your projects, seems like you still have the hacker going in you! Saw Home Assistant one! Kudos!
Love Home Assistant! I have a screen on my split flap display that shows aircraft flying overhead our house (at very high level) - all fed by home assistant and various HACS addons.
What did you use to build the globes?
globe.gl and a little bit of Flask/Python to wrangle the data
This is great data visualization of interesting data! I'm curious about the last graph; there seems to be something making some of the longest flights take more time/nm. Is that real or an artifact, and is there an explanation for the tail?
Great question! It is not an anomaly, it is very geographically specific.
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!
So for London-Tokyo the return route is completely different from the outbound route? Fascinating! I guess that has something to do with the jetstream (which only helps you when travelling eastbound)?
Cool, the data visualization is really neat! Do you have a lot of down time during those long flights and are you able to work on this during that time?
Thank you! Not so much during the flight, but I bring my laptop on most trips, and I use some of the 24-48 hours we get between flights to try to be productive. It helps when I am awake at 2AM (PST) when it is 10AM on my body clock!
when a route doesn't come back as a roundtrip , like you fly LHR > HKG but not the return . how does that usually get handled on your end? do you deadhead back, get reassigned regionally or wait out a layover cycle?
Good question! There are a few routes in my data where the outbound and inbound sectors don't match for this exact reason. Since almost all of our flights begin and end at LHR, if a flight is cancelled we either operate the flight the following day, or fet "positioned" (our word for deadhead) home as a passenger.
Usually when a route changes aircraft, there is a requirement to "position" some pilots out a few days before as passengers to bring the aircraft home when it lands there for the first time. Logistically, very complex!
I'm curious to know what is the small concentrated cluster of flights Northwest of Dulles airport, where the flight durations seem way too high compared to the effective distance between the points.
Those are all of my flights in light aircraft around my hometown in Canada! They fly a little bit slower than the A350 :) There is a similar cluster around the south of Spain where I completed my Commercial/ATPL training.
Oh my god, love these visuals. Geo data is so perfect for dataviz
Super cool. Harkens back to days of Microsoft Flight Simulator
Damn this is soo cool im not even close to understrand all of it but its damn beautiful
Cool. It would be neat to see velocity and altitude too.
Cool viz, I guess it's using https://nivo.rocks/?
It is indeed! And using https://globe.gl/ for the 3D globes.
Love it :-). Do you also need to log the gps co-ordinates as you are flying? I would love to see how you avoid the airspace in the war hit areas.
Not OP, but commercial airliners fly on airways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwaYDVbQvKI& , from waypoint to waypoint.
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.
I wish I had it! Our flight plans contain the full routes (waypoints and airways), but there is no easy way to capture this information.
While not exact prohibited airspace, this map shows where GPS jamming is highest, which roughly corresponds to the warzones: https://gpsjam.org/
Those few days that show back-to-back 14hr days must have been an experience :)
What's your favorite thing to see up in the sky and in the clouds?
The 14 hour days certainly felt long!
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!
I'm surprised that it is mostly back and forth routes. Guess they're called airlines for a reason
Very interesting visualisations! I'm surprised but at the same time not surprised at the apparent overlap between pilots and programmers.
Do you have a favourite/least favourite plane to fly, or are they all the same?
Slightly biased, but right now I am really enjoying the A350!
There are a few "gadgets" that really improve the QoL for pilots (moving map on the ground, camera in the tail for taxiing on the ground, much improved safety systems for situations like blocked pitot tubes, etc).
Those visualizations are really cool! Did you use any AI assisted coding? If the answer is yes, which tool(s) did you use?
Thank you! This was all by hand using Astro, but I have steated experimenting with using AI coding for my newest project (https://liberateloyalty.com/). I have just been using ChatGPT and Copilot so far, and I am totally sold on their helpfulness.
This is amazing, James! Any chance you'd release it open source?
Thank you! It is on my to-do list, I just need to clean up the code a little :)
Maaaaan, this is so cool. I'm geekin'.
Do all your flights start or end in London?
Almost all, but not quite all!
For example, about 6 months ago, I operated the following trip pattern:
LHR -> GIG -> EZE -> GIG -> LHR
The Rio to Buenos Aires and back "shuttle" flight was a day of flying on its own, with 24 hours rest afterwards before flying back to London.
Fascinating!
Hell yeah. This is very cool, happy flying!
Love the destination matrix graph!
Beautiful!
Make an App out of it, sell it to your colleagues? why not?
Very cool! Can you share any info on the 945min flight from back in June?
Thank you!
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.
This is just fun and fantastic. Love it.
How cool! At the end of the movie "Braveheart", the narrator describes his fellows as "warrior poets" - basically the ideal Scottish man. I think that "design-literate pilot" is a reasonable modern version of at least one ideal type of person to be. Congratulations!
Code, data visualizations, aviation, mapping.
All you need to do is throw in some Rust and a custom PCB or two and you have an HN bingo. :)
Sweet hack.
Haha, need to add some AI in there somehow too (no vibing used when making this)!
Love this work. Is this something you can share with your partner in the cockpit often? Would you say you are more of a First Officer Blunt, or a Captain Allears?
I'm flying your most recent route next month(ba218). If I see you I'm going to say something weird, like "I know where you've been flying James". I hope that's okay.
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.
Haha, if there is another James flying the plane, they might be spooked! I'm not flying to Denver for until at least August based on my current roster.
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!
This is super cool, although perhaps the coolest thing is that this website is part of a WEBRING!
Very cool visualisation project!
As for your flying, I just wanted to tell you good luck, we're all counting on you
Are you allowed to code while sitting in the cockpit but not actively flying?
On the long flights where we carry more than two pilots, we have allocated break time away from the cockpit. During those breaks, you can do whatever you like (sleep, watch a film, read a book, etc). I tend to try to sleep on the plane, but I always bring my laptop on trips to work on projects while downroute. Especially on west-coast trips with the 8 hours timezone change, I am usually awake at 2am which is great for being productive!
I am insanely productive when programming on flights without wifi, provided I've cached what I needed to beforehand. Something about it just works
I'm jealous - all that time sitting around to get something productive done, and I can't concentrate at all because I can't relax, the plane suddenly shakes and distracts me, and it feels like I'm lacking oxygen and am not thinking clearly. I remember trying to code some stupid iterator thing in Rust for a few hours and couldn't crack it. On the ground it was solved in like 10 minutes.
Ok, so no high-quality LLMs possible.
this is so cool!
this is cool
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Here I am having accomplished apparently nothing in my life.
Your handle is "supportengineer". Presumably you outrank OP if you count assists, or a share of others' successes.
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!
Relatable
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Oh come on, lighten up a little, it's Friday, it's kinda cool as a display tool. should we reduce the number of flights and CO2 released? Of course.
But no need to be rolling in on a guy that just did something neat...
I’m also not sure how much sense it makes to talk about the personal carbon footprint of a pilot flying for their job, in terms of “could they make decisions that would change how much is released”
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A lot of data and none on his carbon footprint
my thoughts as well