The
latest trip report from Seat 2A introduced me to the notion of unduplicated mileage:
Unduplicated route mileage represents the sum of each unique route flown. So as an example, even though I’ve flown the 1448 mile Anchorage to Seattle route over 300 times, my total unduplicated route mileage for that route is counted only once at 1,450 miles. At present, my total Unduplicated Route Mileage is over 900,000 miles, far more than the total combined route mileage of any airline in the world.
Having
recently put my flight history into a proper database, it's now relatively easy for me to query such things. Thus whilst I have covered 166,691 miles in 165 flights, there are only 93 unique legs – totalling 125,506 miles – out of those.
(I consider each direction between an airport pair as distinct, since there are examples where I've only flown one). I also found it interesting to consider this as a ratio, or ‘novelty factor’: in my case 56% by number of flights, or 75% by distance covered.
The effect is starker by airline. For instance, I have flown 11 times with KLM CityHopper, for 3501 miles: but these were racked up on just 3 distinct routes spanning a mere 885 miles (a novelty factor of 27%). In fact, all but one of those legs was between Bristol and Amsterdam!
Similarly, regular shuttling between Edinburgh and Bristol drops EasyJet down to a mileage novelty of 49%, with my 32 flights only involving 10 distinct routes. BA fares better but still suffers from repeated domestic travel: for mainline services I’ve covered 86017 miles, but only 71% of them novel.
At the other extreme, there are nine airlines for which my slice of their network is completely novel – for the simple reason that I’ve only flown with them once. But for American Airlines I’ve managed 10971 miles over six flights, with no repeats; Air Transat has even more mileage (13505) but that’s just four flights (two pairs of transatlantic returns).
Has anyone else attempted to track this?