On 27 April, 2013, I released my Flight Log website—now located at Flight Historian.
I originally kept track of my flights in a series of text files and spreadsheets, but eventually decided that I wanted to create a website to hold a database of my flights.
An early mockup for my flight log’s layout, which I ultimately did not use.
At launch, my flight log was very basic, essentially requiring me to manually enter all of the data for every flight. Tail numbers in particular were often hard to find, requiring a lot of research if I couldn’t see the registration as I boarded the plane. Now, I can simply email electronic boarding passes to an address I set up, and my flight log will parse the boarding pass data, look up additional flight details, and generate map data which I can import into my Year In Travel posts.
When Flight Log was part of my old Portfolio website, I mocked up a Flight Log specific navigation bar to make it act like a different section of the site. Before actually implementing it, I instead made the decision to split Flight Log off into its own separate site.
When Paul Bogard’s Flight Log launched, I had 236 flights to include in it; ten years later, I had flown over a thousand flights. The first trip I took after launching my flight log was to Oklahoma City, two days after launch, and my first new airport after launch was Detroit (DTW) on that same trip.