I started noting down the details, except aircraft types, aircraft reg and seat numbers, as from the beginning of 1996 so my “modern” record is quite complete. I was inspired to do it because I wanted to keep note of my flights to avoid any problems crediting to the Qualiflyer system at the time. It was all done by paper then and you had to carefully preserve boarding passes. I was thinking of scanning them, but I haven’t got round to it. I have the Qualiflyer newsletters from the time, as well as from the beginning of the SWISS era. I’ve even got a number of old timetables. Naturally, I logged all flights, including the BA ones to get back to the north of Scotland at the time.

The log is simply written into a Pages document, one line for each flight, one large “paragraph” block for each year, one document for each decade. Now that I write brief reviews I do one document for each quarter, i.e. January to March inclusive. Eventually I save them as PDF documents. The whole thing doesn’t take that much ttime and is quite fun. Sometimes I tell the crews if I am on a landmark, such as 500th or 750th flight (I’m actually on flight 1,125).