An offhand comment by a student yesterday – “You must have spent a lot of time on planes?” got me thinking. I’ve always wondered how many days in total I’d spent in flight, so it was time to calculate it.
This proved to be difficult, and forgetting details about decades-old trips means my conclusions will be an underestimate. But I did my best to tabulate all my flights and consulted a database of times to calculate the total.
As best I can tell, I’ve taken at least 220 flights in my life, starting from my flight to the USA back in 1993.
In total, the flying time for these flights is about 1290 hours, or just under fifty-four days spent in-flight. Almost two months of my life spent sitting on a plane!
If we look at miles, I have flown at least 640,000 air miles in total. This is enough to fly around the world over 25 times.
This total includes 64 pan-pacific flights, and 37 flights that crossed the equator.
The above is my lifetime total frequent flyer miles as of today. For about half the time I’ve flown I never signed up for a mileage program, and it’s only been about five years that I’ve been collecting them. If I had my lifetime earned mileage, I’d be able to get multiple free first-class tickets to anywhere!
Only 36% of my flights have been international, but about 75% of my flying time and miles are from the international flights.
I was curious how this compared to the ‘average’ person but statistics about flights taken and international travel are surprisingly hard to find. It seems Americans – the world’s most frequent flyers – take about 2 flights a year and only 25% of those are international, so I’m well above average.
As mentioned this is an estimate, and doesn’t include flights taken as a child (to Germany and Australia) and likely omits domestic flights forgotten over the years. But even at 54 days total… that’s a lot!
I wonder how many more flights are in my future?