Show HN: I'm an airline pilot – I built interactive graphs/globes of my flights

Posted by jamesharding 6/27/2025

Show HN: I'm an airline pilot – I built interactive graphs/globes of my flights(jameshard.ing)

Hey HN!

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!

1539 points | 197 commentspage 3

collinvandyck76 6/27/2025|

This is inspiring me to collect more of my own data -- great job!

dylan604 6/27/2025|

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

cetinsert 6/27/2025||

See https://RTEdge.net too, if you like globes with interactive nodes and edges!

ljsocal 6/28/2025||

Impressive and very cool! You might consider making this into a globe route generator that folks will pay for. See https://anim8map.com/

As an active airline passenger for the past 50 years, I wish I’d kept a log my many hundreds of flights. Some day I’ll sit down and attempt an educated guess.

jamesharding 6/28/2025|

Cool website! The idea of rendering it to a video is an interesting one.

I had thought that a challenge trying to turn something like I have built into a business would be that people would be reluctant to pay for (yet another) subscription for something like this that they probably look at infrequently.

ljsocal 6/30/2025|||

Anim8's business model lets you buy credits that you can then use over whatever time works for you. Essentially a use fee rather than a pay regardless of use.

ljsocal 6/30/2025|||

here's what the last three months of retirement travel look like: https://share.icloud.com/photos/0bfsKT8PAv_CxDl4pVRWe9-iQ

Among many cool experiences was taking "Le Shuttle" under the English Channel - it's perhaps the most impressive piece of civil engineering I've seen.

IncreasePosts 6/27/2025||

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.

jamesharding 6/27/2025|

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!

IncreasePosts 6/28/2025||

What about flightaware.com? I punched in ba218 and I can see what appear to my untrained eye to be actual position:

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/BAW218/history/20250...

jasonthorsness 6/27/2025||

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

jamesharding 6/27/2025||

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?)

FL410 6/27/2025||

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)

NKosmatos 6/27/2025||

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.

willsmith72 6/27/2025||

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?

cyberax 6/27/2025||

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.

willsmith72 6/27/2025||

Well shucks to my high school physics teacher

HeavenFox 6/27/2025||

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

ngoel36 6/28/2025||

If you want something similar for yourself personally, I've found Flighty on iOS to be amazing https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flighty-live-flight-tracker/id...

frenchman_in_ny 6/27/2025||

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.

jamesharding 6/27/2025|

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!

ziofill 6/27/2025||

How did you make the world not pick up a geometric phase as you move it around? It's always oriented nicely.

jamesharding 6/27/2025|

The https://github.com/vasturiano/globe.gl library seems to use this as the default

jimmySixDOF 6/28/2025||

Vasturiano is a master what he does to combine D3 and ThreeJS is a huge decomplexifier everything can run in a single html file so simple so elegant so useful.

sandspar 6/27/2025|

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!

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