All my Flights

Till now, I have flown a total of 481,333 miles. That is more than 19 times around the world, and twice the distance to the moon.

I have done this via a total of 187 flight segments, passing through 37 airports, in 11 countries and utilizing 24 carriers.

I have flown as north as Edinborough (EDI), as south and east as Kuala Lumpur (KUL), and as west as San Francisco (SFO).

The longest flight I have taken is the 14 hour leg from Dubai (DXB) to New York (JFK). The shortest is the 37 minute hop between Milwaukee (MKE) and Chicago (ORD).

All these stats are thanks to two things. One, my idiosyncrasy of keeping a log of all the flights I have ever taken. The second is the site for people like me called OpenFlights.org

All I needed was a bit of excel transformation to convert my existing flight log into a format acceptable to the site, upload and done.

That is how I know that if I had taken all the flights one after another, I would have spent 43 days, 22 hours and 39 minutes in the air. In reality, if I include all the check-in and waiting times, you could call it about two months in airports and flights around the world.

Iron Man Cometh

After living in the minds of kids, nerds and movie makers for decades, a true practical jet pack has finally emerged. The Martin Jetpack is the world's first usable personal flying vehicle.

This is definitely not the first successful jet pack. Earlier attempts like the Bell Rocket Belt, had been successful, but barely usable. The initial version had a flight time of about 20 seconds that increased to 30 seconds through later innovations.

The Martin Jetpack achieves almost 30 minutes of flight time. Built from carbon fiber composite, the device has a dry weight of about 250 lbs driven by a 2.0 L V4 2 stroke engine rated at 200 hp (150 kw). The best part - the fuel for the jet pack is premium gasoline.

The jetpacks are now available for commercial sale. Some reports have put the price at around $86,000. Not bad if it means you will fly to your next big evening.