Log your own flights: a flight diary with types, registrations and miles

If you note every registration at the fence, you rarely board an aircraft without knowing what kind of machine it is. Even so, for many spotters their own flights end up at best as a boarding pass in a drawer. Yet every flight as a passenger is also a sighting, just from the inside. If you document your own flights, a flight diary grows over time with types, registrations, routes and kilometers. This guide shows you what belongs in it, how to find type and registration even afterward, how distances are calculated and how to connect it all to your spotting logbook.

Logging your own flights: the short answer

For each flight you create an entry with date, flight number, departure and destination airport, airline, aircraft type and registration, supplemented by seat, class and a few notes. You find type and registration at the gate, when boarding or afterward via the flight number’s flight history on a flight tracker service. You calculate the distance as the great-circle distance between the two airports. Whether you use a notebook, a spreadsheet or an app for this is secondary. What matters is that you use a fixed scheme from the start.

Why spotters document their own flights

For frequent flyers, a flight diary is mainly statistics: how often was I on the road, how many countries, how many kilometers? For plane spotters a second layer is added. A flight is an encounter with one very specific aircraft, and that aircraft can meet you again later, at the fence, in a photo or on the flight tracker.

If you keep your logbook by registration, you quickly notice how the worlds connect. The Boeing 737-800 you flew on vacation lands at your home airport half a year later. The Airbus A350-900 from your long-haul flight gets repainted into a special livery. Without registrations in the diary, you would never notice such connections.

Add the collecting aspect. Many spotters keep lists of all the types they have seen, and a second one of all the types they have flown on. The second is usually much shorter and correspondingly appealing. How to set up such lists in general is covered in Collecting all aircraft types. If you want to deliberately bring rarities into your flight diary, you will find ideas in Flying on rare aircraft types as a passenger.

These fields belong in your flight diary

A good flight diary is a compromise between completeness and effort. The following table shows which details are worthwhile, where you get them and how best to note them.

Field	Required or optional	Where you get it	Notation tip
Date	Required	Boarding pass, booking	ISO format YYYY-MM-DD, then every spreadsheet sorts correctly
Flight number	Required	Boarding pass	Airline code plus number without a space, such as LH400
Departure and destination	Required	Boarding pass	IATA codes such as FRA or MUC, consistent for all entries
Airline	Required	Boarding pass, livery	operating carrier, not just the ticket seller
Aircraft type	Required	Gate, safety card, flight tracker	exact variant, such as A320neo instead of just A320
Registration	Optional, required for spotters	Gate, boarding, flight history	with hyphen as on the fuselage, such as D-AINA
Seat and class	Optional	Boarding pass	Row and letter, class as an abbreviation
Runways, times, weather	Optional	own observation, flight tracker	only note what you know for sure
Notes and photos	Optional	yourself	Occasion, particulars, file name of the pictures

Two fields deserve special attention. For the airline, you should enter the company that actually operates the flight. With codeshares, the boarding pass often shows the flight number of a different airline, and even within groups such as the Lufthansa Group, subsidiaries often fly under the parent’s brand. For the aircraft type, the exact variant is worthwhile. Whether you sat in an A320neo or an older A320ceo, you recognize from the outside mainly by the engines – the guide A320neo or ceo? shows the differences.

Finding type and registration – at the airport

The best time for the registration is before boarding. At many gates you see your aircraft through the windows, and with luck the registration is clearly legible on the fuselage. A quick phone photo is enough to enter it beyond doubt later. Where the registration has to be on the aircraft and how you read it is explained in Understanding aircraft registrations and Where the registration has to be on the aircraft.

Further opportunities:

• When boarding via stairs: At apron positions you walk right along the aircraft. Registration, engines and sometimes the christening name can then be seen from up close. Photograph only where it is allowed, and do not hold up operations.
• The identification plate: A fireproof plate near the main entrance is required, bearing among other things the registration. Whether it is visible to you when boarding depends on the aircraft – you should not rely on it.
• The safety card: The card in the seat pocket applies to a specific aircraft model and generally names the type. The registration is not on it, but you have the type in black and white.
• From the window: At the destination airport, it is worth looking outside. A photo of the wingtip or the engine helps later in determining the variant. Tips for good pictures are in the article Photographing from the airplane window.

Determining type and registration afterward

If you forgot to note the registration, that is usually no problem – provided you are quick. On flight tracker services such as Flightradar24 or FlightAware, you search for your flight number and open its history. There you see for each day which aircraft flew the connection, with type and registration. The difference between flight number and radio callsign, which can sometimes trip you up in the search, is explained in Callsign and flight number.

The catch is the length of the history. For free, the history on both big services goes back about seven days. For older flights you need a subscription with a longer history or other sources. What is available and how far back each service reaches is covered in detail in Retrieving an aircraft’s flight history. If you know the registration and want to know more about the aircraft, the article How old is this aircraft? shows the way to year of manufacture and history.

Kilometers and miles: what your diary really counts

For many, the distance is the most exciting value in the flight diary. It is important to understand what is actually being measured.

Flight diaries and logging services almost always calculate with the great-circle distance. That is the shortest connection between two points on the surface of a sphere, calculated from the coordinates of the two airports. The open service OpenFlights, for example, explicitly names great-circle distances as the basis of its statistics in its FAQ. The advantage: everyone gets the same value for the same route, and the numbers stay comparable.

The distance actually flown is almost always longer. Aircraft follow set routes and departure and approach procedures, fly around thunderstorms or closed airspace and occasionally fly holding patterns. If you want to see the real track, you find it in the flight tracker service’s playback. For the diary, the great-circle distance is enough.

For units, there are three common variants:

• Kilometers – the obvious choice in German-speaking countries.
• Statute miles, about 1.609 kilometers – the default in many English-language apps.
• Nautical miles, exactly 1.852 kilometers – the unit in which pilots and air traffic control give distances.

Decide on one unit and stick with it. If you mix values from different apps without paying attention to the unit, you get statistics that are wrong.

Diary miles are not bonus miles

A common misunderstanding: the miles in your flight diary have little to do with the miles in your frequent flyer account. Programs such as Miles & More set their own rules; in many programs the credit depends on fare, ticket price or travel class instead of the distance flown. How that works in detail is explained in Miles & More explained and Understanding frequent flyer programs. For your diary, only geography counts.

Notebook, spreadsheet or app?

For the form of your flight diary there is no right answer, only different strengths. A notebook is beautiful and independent of any technology, but can hardly be analyzed. A spreadsheet is flexible and belongs entirely to you. Apps take care of distance calculation, map and statistics for you and can partly import flights from your calendar or emails, but tie you to a provider.

A pragmatic way: record your flights in an app that provides a map and distances, and regularly export the data to your own spreadsheet. Many services offer an export; OpenFlights, for example, supports import and export via CSV. Which apps suit passengers is compared in the article Flight diary apps for passengers. You will find the basic trade-off between paper and digital in Notebook, spreadsheet or app, and a ready-made structure to copy in Spotting logbook in Excel or Google Sheets.

Adding old flights

Many people start their flight diary only after years and wonder how to reconstruct the past. It is rarely completely thorough, but with a bit of detective work a surprising amount comes together:

• Booking confirmations in your email inbox provide date, flight number and route. A search for terms like “booking confirmation,” “boarding” or the airline’s name often turns up years of flights.
• The frequent flyer account shows the flights of recent years with date and route in many programs.
• Old photos carry a capture date in the metadata. A picture from the window or the gate sometimes even reveals type and registration.
• Calendars and travel documents close further gaps.

For older flights you will usually no longer find the registration, because the free flight history does not go back far enough for it. Then honestly enter “unknown” instead of guessing. For the type, it often helps to know which models an airline used on the route back then – but mark such entries as uncertain.

From diary to statistics

A well-kept flight diary becomes more interesting with every entry. Typical analyses are:

• Flights and kilometers per year – the classic frequent flyer curve.
• Type ranking: Which model have you flown most often, which are you still missing? On short and medium haul, families such as the Airbus A320neo or the 737 usually lead, on long haul types such as the Boeing 787-9.
• Airlines and alliances: How are your flights distributed across carriers such as Lufthansa, Condor, Eurowings or Ryanair? And how much of it falls on alliances such as Star Alliance?
• Airports: How often have you traveled via hubs such as Frankfurt Airport or Munich Airport, which airports have you seen only once?
• Repeat offenders: Have you flown on a particular registration more than once? With airlines with a small fleet on a route, that happens more often than you think.

How to set up such analyses cleanly and which metrics really say something is covered in Analyzing your own spotting statistics. If you want to deliberately record a fleet completely, combine flights and sightings following the principle in Recording fleets completely.

Connecting flight diary and spotting logbook

The real added value for spotters comes when flights and sightings do not live in two separate worlds. There are two approaches for this.

With a shared logbook, you keep everything in one list and distinguish only by a field such as “Type: sighting / flight.” That is clear and makes comparisons trivial. With a separate logbook, you maintain two lists with an identical scheme and link them via the registration. That makes sense if you keep many additional fields for flights such as seat and class that would stay empty for sightings.

In both cases the same applies: the registration is the key. How to record sightings in a structured way is explained in Documenting sightings: the logbook. Photos you take on the road are best labeled right away with registration and type – the instructions are in Labeling photos properly. And if you collect not just aircraft but also airports, Documenting airports you have visited helps.

Conclusion

A flight diary takes little effort if you maintain it right after every trip. The boarding pass supplies date, flight number and route, and you get type and registration at the gate or within a week via the flight number’s flight history. You calculate the distance as great-circle distance in a fixed unit and keep it strictly separate from bonus miles. With consistent spellings, your flights become part of your spotting logbook, and at some point the aircraft from your vacation lands in front of your lens again.