How Do I Keep a Diary of Every Flight I Take?

What should I record for each flight?

Start with the facts that are easy to lose, then add the details you enjoy.

• Date and flight number. They identify the flight and let you look up everything else later.
• Route. Departure and arrival airports, ideally with their codes, such as CDG to JFK.
• Airline. And the operating airline when a codeshare partner flew it.
• Aircraft type and registration. The registration is the one detail that is hard to recover years later. See how to find the aircraft type and how to find a registration.
• Seat and cabin. Where you sat and in which class.
• Times. Scheduled and actual, if you care about delays.
• Notes, photos and meals. The view, the crew, the weather, what you ate. This is what makes a diary pleasant to reread.

Keep your booking reference out of any note you may share: see what a PNR is.

Paper, spreadsheet or app?

Whatever you choose, make sure you can export it in a plain format such as CSV, and keep a copy somewhere else. A diary of ten years is worth more than the tool that holds it.

Which habits make it last?

1. Log at the gate, not at the end of the year. Details fade quickly, and two minutes after landing is enough.
2. Keep every boarding pass, paper or digital. Keep a photo or a screenshot of it. A pass contains the flight, the seat and the date.
3. Use your emails. Booking confirmations are a free record of every flight. See how to log flights from booking emails.
4. Fill in the past once. Gather older flights from airline accounts, your calendar and your inbox: how to find your flight history.
5. Add a line, not an essay. One sentence per flight is enough. You can write more when a flight is special.
6. Review once a year. Check for missing flights and look at your totals: how many miles have you flown.

How do I do it with FlightLog?

FlightLog is a flight diary for iPhone, iPad and Android, available in 33 languages. It works offline, and an account is optional if you want your logbook synced. There are several ways to add a flight:

• Type a flight number and a date: the schedule lookup fills the airports and times.
• Scan a paper or digital boarding pass with the camera or from a photo: it reads the barcode and the printed text. See how to scan a boarding pass.
• Take a photo of a booking confirmation or e-ticket: all its flights are read at once.
• Forward booking emails to your personal import address: the flights arrive as pending flights you confirm.
• Import trips from the phone calendar, or a file exported from another app such as Flighty, OpenFlights or myFlightradar24.

Each flight can carry its aircraft type and registration, seat, notes, photos and meals. FlightLog turns them into total distance, time in the air, countries, airports, airlines, routes and aircraft types, year by year, with every route on an interactive 3D globe and a 2D map. The flight passport adds an entry stamp for every country, and achievements and shareable statistics cards make the diary fun to show. You can export to PDF, CSV and JSON at any time.

Every feature is free with the 10 most recent flights active, and Premium unlocks the complete history. Boarding passes and tickets (passenger name, booking reference) stay on your phone and are never synced to the server. To see what the app offers, visit features.