jamesharding

The pulse pairs themselves are always 12 us apart. The jitter comes from the aircraft sending interrogations at random intervals in a steam, so that it can discern which returns are at at the same interval as the ones that were sent. I can make the animation more obvious for this -- on my to do list :)

As for VOR approaches, I have done a handful in my career, especially into some of the smaller airports around Europe (Greek islands!), but these are gradually also being replaced with RNAV approaches generally.

On the A320 which I flew at the time, even VOR approaches were flown using a coded approach path, with the VOR needle itself being used for crosschecking. In the sim, we fly them still to make sure we remember how to, but they are quite rare these days!

Valid question!

The vast majority of approaches are still using an ILS. Pretty much the only time we would use an alternative approach (most often RNAV or LPV, and rarely VOR) would be if an ILS is not available.

That said, in the US especially, controllers are quite keen to offer a "visual approach" as it then relieves them of the duty to maintain separation from the aircraft in front. This is a cultural thing in the US, and the rest of the world does not operate this way. Even when flying a "visual approach" in the US, the ILS is usually still radiating, and we often still fly the approach using the autopilot coupled to the ILS, just maintaining our own separation from other traffic visually.

Interesting idea!

Most in-flight wifi systems also have an API with many of these stats (to show on the captive portal page), so I wonder if you could source any additional data from these APIs?

Here was my interactive logbook post from last year for those interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44396518

I work as an airline pilot, and I just recently calculated mine to be 65,658 tonnes in my 10-year career so far (not quite so bad when calculated per seat-mile, but still eye opening!). https://jameshard.ing/pilot/#statistics

Hey HN! I had a flight cancelled last month because of a defect (a spoiler system fault) that wasn’t deferrable under the MEL. That meant: no legal way to dispatch the aircraft, so we cancelled the flight and I got an extra few nights in Austin.

While we were explaining to passengers why we couldn’t go, it occurred to me that a lot of people don’t realise that airlines can (and do) fly with certain things inoperative, but only under very specific, pre-defined rules.

I wrote up a bit of insight into how the Minimum Equipment List (MEL) works, hope you enjoy reading!

https://jameshard.ing is mine :)

My airline pilot logbook statistics page was quite popular on HN last year

If you ever hear my name on the PA, please come up to say hello! In fact, after the flight when it is not busy, we are always happy to have visitors in the flight deck. Feel free to drop me a message any time too, the A350 is a pretty small fleet, so the chances are higher than one would think! :)

Exactly that! This is the only route that I know of where this is the case.

Looks like today’s flight home is following that route: https://uk.flightaware.com/live/flight/BAW8/history/20250629...

So happy to hear that!

I have only had very few incident with ill-behaved passengers, and none that escalated. Ill passengers is a different story, especially on longer flights! With no hard data to back this up, I think that medical emergencies are probably the most common form of abnormal event that we encounter.

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.

Thanks! My father being a pilot certainly played a large part, not in the sense that he forced me into it, but rather that I had the opportunity to sit on the jump seat as a kid (pre-9/11) and it planted the seed quite early.

After finishing my degree, British Airways had opened their cadet pilot scheme - windows of opportunity like that are usually short and infrequent, so I went for it! The nice this is that I can still code and keep up on the software engineering trends (what I tell myself while checking HN for the n-th time in a day) on the side, and I think it is also a safe set of skills to have in case I can no longer fly (pandemics, losing my medical, etc)

Flying Eastbound across the international date line also kind of counts as going back in time, right?

It truly has been the career highlight for me! He will be retiring in a few months, so we have the last flight together planned aleady.

Hopefully you will be able to have the same experience with your kids! What fleet are you on currently?

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!

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.

Haha, need to add some AI in there somehow too (no vibing used when making this)!

Thank you! It is on my to-do list, I just need to clean up the code a little :)

globe.gl and a little bit of Flask/Python to wrangle the data

Glad you like it! I have a screen on there which shows my flights live while airborne - maybe worth a post of its own :)

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).

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.

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!

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?

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!

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!

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.

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!