What's actually worth counting in a flight log

Once you have your flights written down, you have to decide what to count. This sounds trivial and isn't, because each available total rewards a different kind of travelling, and none of them is neutral.

Here is what each one measures, what it quietly gets wrong, and which combination actually describes a person.

Flights

The easiest number and the least informative.

A flight is a flight whether it was forty minutes to Amsterdam or eighteen hours to Auckland, so the total is dominated by whoever takes the most short hops. Someone with a weekly commuter route will out-count a person who has crossed six oceans, and the number will imply something untrue about both.

Useful for one thing only: a rough sense of how often flying happens in your life, as distinct from how far it takes you.

Distance

The best single number, and the one most worth having.

It scales correctly — an eighteen-hour flight counts as roughly twenty-five times a forty-minute one, which is about right — and it is objective, provided everyone computes it the same way. That means great circle distance between the two airports, which is what airlines and loyalty programmes use.

The catch is that distance is meaningless at scale. Nobody has an intuition for 412,000 miles. It only becomes a number you can hold when it's compared to something:

• One lap of the Earth is 40,075 km, or 24,901 miles. Most frequent travellers pass this without noticing.
• The Moon is 384,400 km away — 238,900 miles. This is the milestone that actually takes a career.
• Geostationary orbit is 35,786 km up, which is a shade under one lap of the planet.
• The Kármán line, where aviation stops being aviation, is 100 km. You will pass it in your first hour of flying, sideways.

Those comparisons are the point of the distance total. On its own it's an inventory number; measured against the Moon it becomes something you can tell someone.

Hours

Correlates with distance, so it adds less than it looks like it does — and where it diverges, it diverges for the wrong reasons.

Hours reward slow aircraft, headwinds, inefficient routings and turboprops. Two people who have flown the same distance can differ by a hundred hours based on what equipment happened to be assigned. As a primary measure it's noise; as a secondary one it's the honest answer to "how much of your life has been spent in a seat", which is a genuinely different question from "how far have you gone".

Countries

The most quoted number and the most contested, for reasons gone into at length here: the rules differ, they produce totals that differ by a factor of three, and almost nobody says which rule they're using.

Beyond the definitional mess, it has a structural bias. Country counts reward proximity to borders. Someone flying out of Brussels can add a country in under an hour; someone in Australia cannot add one in under three. The number measures geography as much as it measures travelling — thirty-four countries sit within three hours of London, and none of them says much about the person who visited them.

Worth counting. Not worth taking seriously as a ranking.

Continents

Only seven, so it saturates almost immediately and stops discriminating.

Which is precisely what makes it good. Continents are the coarsest possible measure of coverage, and coverage is the thing distance and country counts both miss. Five continents from twenty flights describes a very different traveller from five continents from four hundred — and going from four to five is a real event in a way that going from the fortieth country to the forty-first is not.

Airports

Rewards variety over distance, which makes it the natural counterweight to the distance total.

It's also the number that most quickly reveals the difference between two people with identical mileage: forty airports means exploring, six airports means a very well-worn line. And unlike countries, there is no argument about the rules. You either landed there or you didn't.

Routes

The underrated one.

A route is a distinct pair of airports, counted once however many times you've flown it. Set the route count against the flight count and you get the single most revealing ratio in the whole log:

• 200 flights across 180 routes is a life of going to new places.
• 200 flights across 12 routes is a commute with a passport.

Same flight total, same distance possibly, completely different lives. Neither of the headline numbers can tell them apart, and this ratio does it instantly.

Related: hubs — airports you've been through three or more times. The hub list is not a travel statistic at all. It's a biography. It shows where you have lived, where your family is, and which company you worked for.

So what should you actually track?

Four numbers, and they answer four different questions:

1. Distance, compared against something cosmic — how far.
2. Routes against flights — how varied.
3. Continents — how much of the world.
4. Hubs — where your life actually is.

Countries and hours are worth having and are best treated as colour rather than as scores. Flight count on its own tells you almost nothing.

What Orbit does with this

All of the above is computed in a single pass, so the figures can't disagree with each other: distance, hours, flights, trips, airports with visit counts, countries with first-seen dates, continents, distinct routes and hubs.

The distance total is always shown next to a comparison — laps of the Earth, and how far along the way to the Moon — because the raw number doesn't mean anything until it is.

On top of that there are 28 badges and a level track. The badges are milestones rather than points: first flight, crossing the equator, a great circle past the Arctic circle, a single leg over 7,000 miles, every continent including Antarctica, one lap of the planet, the Moon, a million miles. All of them are earned by flying and none of them can be bought — Orbit Pro raises the flight limit, and it does not hand you a badge.

The level track collapses everything into one number: one XP per ten miles, plus a bonus for each first-time airport, country and continent, across forty levels and nine rank names from Ground Crew up to Voyager. Because the bonuses only fire on firsts, it is genuinely path-dependent — the fortieth flight to the same city earns distance and nothing else, which is the correct incentive and an accurate description of what that flight was.

Related reading: how many times around the Earth have you flown? and what your flight map says about you.