TheFlyingDoctor

The latest trip report from Seat 2A introduced me to the notion of unduplicated mileage:

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?

jrl767

BuildingMyBento

Allan38103

No, I don't have any desire to keep track of this.

WY114

Cool idea! I have added these parameters to my much less interactive and more colorless flight log.

My novelty factor in terms of miles is at 74% (247k/335k) and leg-wise goes down to 61% (162/265). Already thinking whether achieving 250k unduplicated miles will be worth a celebration too!

Kiwi Flyer

My unduplicated route mileage is over 1.1 million miles if ignore direction and over 1.7 million miles if each direction is considered to be unique.

Annalisa12

Me either..i can never remember when or where I went.

jrl767

of ~2.5M total miles, less than 500k are unique (can't say I'm surprised, with only half a dozen long international trips: 1xJapan, 1xSouth America, 4xEurope)

TheFlyingDoctor

Oh, for sure this will only appeal to folks in the centre of a very specific venn diagram, but I figured if they're anywhere, they're here on FlyerTalk . It's only a happy accident that I have records of all my flights (dates and route, at least!) - I had minimal interest in aviation growing up, and didn't get on a plane until I was 21. Fortunately during the stage between that first flight and realising that this was a topic that interests me, I kept either my boarding pass stubs, booking emails, or both, so was able to figure out my history to that point. Still sad that I didn't pay attention to aircraft types - and even sadder that I wasn't chasing airmiles!

TheFlyingDoctor

Hefty numbers either way! I figure 1.7M is the appropriate number, since you could fly a route and not its reverse.

Yes, I guess the way to boost both the raw figure and the ratio is to have lots of one-off longhaul flights. Which I think is a reasonable travel goal It's also occurred to me that cities with two major airports that have overlapping destinations are a way to 'double count' a city pair: for instance, there's a whole bunch of Canadian destinations I visited on cheap operators out of Gatwick but would hope to revisit from Heathrow.

RustyC

It's too much of an undertaking to try to track but I think I'd do well. Almost all my Europe trips were one-off nibbles driven by a fare and mileage and all that, and the South Pacific strategy was award trips with a stopover and a final destination. ULCCs like Air Asia also facilitate this sort of thing within a region.

Would think it definitely favors "plant the flag" travelers like I was (i.e. redeem aggressively for free trips rather than upgrades) and still to a lesser degree am. The trips to earn the miles also had destination diversity. The thing about biz travel is that for so many people the mileage was run up via repetitive trips to not so exciting destinations ("the plant in Peoria") so by this metric it'd only count once.

lhrsfo

As I started flying when I was 18 months old, and my parents are long since gone, I have absolutely no way of finding out what my flight history is.

jrl767

pinniped

Really stupid question: if the distance between ANC and SEA is 1448, then how is the unduplicated flight mileage 1450?

If this is intending to count departures and approaches from/to all different runway combinations, the difference would be more than two miles. Otherwise, why wouldn't it just be 1448?

TheFlyingDoctor

Good spot! I doubt the intention is to get as precise as distinct runways, and it's simply a typo / accidental discrepancy in level of detail between the two sentences. At any rate, I'm just counting the great circle distance between the airport pair - ignoring the fact that almost certainly a different distance is actually flown, as I presume everyone does when quoting their mileage. This does mean my LGW-LGW counts as 0 miles!