Posted by jamesharding 3 days ago
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!
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.
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?
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.
[1] https://logten.com/ [2] https://jameshard.ing/posts/querying-logten-pilot-logbook-sq...
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...
Quaternions have some nice properties for some operations with 3D rotations, but they are not a panacea.
I would love to switch (back) to teaching but a 10x pay cut is not doable. Maybe close to retirement I will give it a try.
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?
The surveys are (usually) 200m spaced grid lines 20km (or so) long flown 80m above ground, the calibration flights are stacked lines from quite high up down to ground level so that the post processing can estimate and subtract cosmic radiation "from above" and how it falls off through the current atmosphere (density, humidity, etc. thinning out current gamma inflow from up high).
Such things, if accessed, would fine tune a radiometric exposure by height model in the same way that using the global magnetic model(s) (there are two main ones) can tune up true north magnetic readings .. it's a fine adjustment that only matters to some.
Some working airport that your cross somewhere in the world likely has a hanger full of geophys survey craft (helicopters and planes) .. might be worth chasing up.
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.
can you share some tech details?
https://github.com/ClickHouse/adsb.exposed/
In fact, the data processing pipeline is entirely trivial (a one-page shell script), and the frontend is also trivial (a single HTML page with vanilla JavaScript).
I'm an airline pilot here in the US and it would be the privilege of a lifetime to be able to do that with one of my kids.
Hopefully you will be able to have the same experience with your kids! What fleet are you on currently?
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.