- A short-haul year
- 295,000 mi
- A long-haul year
- 379,000 mi
- Laps of the Earth
- 12–15
At 800 block hours a year. The working is below.
A logbook for the flying, not the paperwork
Every sector
Departure, arrival and date are all it needs. Add the airline, flight number and times if you want them. A flight with a stop is one flight with two legs, and both count.
Layover cities and countries
Every airport you've landed at, every country and continent, tallied as you go — out of 8,801 airports that ship inside the app.
Rotations as trips
Group the sectors of a pairing into a trip, so a four-day rotation reads as one thing rather than six loose flights.
Deadheads too
Positioning flights are real distance. Log them like any other and write "DH" in the notes if you want to tell them apart later.
Logged in the crew rest
Search and distance work with no signal at all. Log the sector while you're still on it.
Your career as numbers
Total distance, hours, laps of the Earth and 28 badges for real milestones — the Moonshot one takes most people a lifetime and a working crew member less than a year.
How far do cabin crew fly in a year?
About 290,000 miles on short-haul and 380,000 on long-haul, for a year of 800 block hours. That's 12 to 15 laps of the Earth every year, which gets you past the Moon inside a year on either.
Long-haul crew cover more ground per hour, not because the aircraft are faster but because taxi, climb and descent are a smaller share of a nine-hour sector than a two-hour one. The ceiling is legal: EASA caps block hours at 900 a calendar year.
| Block hours | Short-haul | Long-haul | Laps |
|---|---|---|---|
| 600 | 221,000 mi | 284,000 mi | 9–11 |
| 700 | 258,000 mi | 332,000 mi | 10–13 |
| 800 | 295,000 mi | 379,000 mi | 12–15 |
| 900 (EASA cap) | 332,000 mi | 426,000 mi | 13–17 |
How it's worked out: a typical short-haul sector of 700 miles (London to Barcelona) and a long-haul one of 4,500 (London to Mumbai), each timed with the same block-time estimate Orbit and its route pages use — 500 mph plus 30 minutes on the ground. That works out to about 368 and 474 miles per block hour. One lap is 40,075 km. A real roster will differ; the order of magnitude won't.
Your career, in distance
Put in your own year and how long you've been flying.
- Distance
- 1,381,579 mi
- 2,223,436 km
- Sectors
- 1,974
- Laps of the Earth
- 55
- Distance to the Moon
- 5.8×
Already have a total? Turn it into laps with the calculator on how many times around the Earth a million miles is, or check a single sector with the distance calculator.
What Orbit isn't
Not a roster app
There's no roster import and no connection to AIMS, Sabre, Flica or any airline system. Every sector goes in by hand. If you want your roster synced, keep the roster app you have; Orbit sits next to it.
Not a duty-hours or FTL tracker
Orbit estimates flying time from distance for your stats. It doesn't count duty periods, rest or limits, and nothing it shows should be used to check whether a pairing is legal.
Not an official logbook
Cabin crew aren't required to keep one: your operator keeps your flight and duty records. Orbit is the personal record — the one that's yours to keep.
15 free flights is about 2 weeks of your roster
The free tier is 15 flights— plenty for a passenger's year, and about 2 weeks of short-haul or 9 of long-haul for you. Use it as a trial. If you keep going, Lifetime is the plan that fits a flying career: one payment, no limit, no renewal.
What flight attendants ask about logging flights
No. In the US, the FAA's logbook rule (14 CFR 61.51) applies to pilots; a flight attendant holds a Certificate of Demonstrated Proficiency, which carries no logbook requirement. Under EASA, the operator keeps each crew member's flight, duty and rest records (ORO.FTL.245). Your airline holds the official record — a personal log is for you.
Start with the flights you remember
Log this month's roster first, then fill in older ones as they turn up. The guide to reconstructing your flight history covers where old sectors hide.