As I was a booking my flights to EthLisbon, a crypto conference, I wanted to convolute the journey immediately. I love optimising journeys. I hate packing and I’d rather hope through a few cities in one go than divide my visits into multiple stand-alone trips. Usually, it’s also cheaper.
I decided to fly:
Berlin - Cambridge, to visit some friends, and because Berlin → Cambridge → Lisbon is significantly cheaper than Berlin → Lisbon.
Cambridge - Lisbon, to go EthLisbon and meet up with my co-founder Hugo.
Lisbon - Madrid, to visit my co-founder and hack with him from his place
Madrid - Berlin, to go back home.
I thought about the last time I flew somewhere. And how these convoluted journeys were the norm norm throughout my adult life before Covid.
I decided to map all my flights throughout my life and do some simple data analysis on it. For my 18th birthday, my father gave me a flight log of my entire life. I decided to continue it. I’ve totalled a whopping 381 flights, with over 0.5M km. And also about 500kg of CO2 emissions for the flights itself (not including infrastructure and plane production emissions), which fairs much better than the same 0.5M km travelled by car (which I would have never done, so the emissions are incommensurable). Also, ban cruise ships, because they’re 100X worse. And plant trees.
Anyway, I made a small graph with the different periods. 1991-95 I lived in Moscow, because my dad was a correspondent there. We would fly extremely often to Poland or Germany to see family. Then, after the first Chechen War, when Russia became unbearable, we moved to my homeland, Poland.
I am clocking an average of 10 flights per year during my school years, most of which to holiday destinations (dominated by Spain and Georgia) or to see my German family.
Then I took a gap year, where I travelled Eastern Europe intensively, and then studied in the UK. Then, from the start of my adulthood until Covid, I clock an average of 1.5 flights per month (19 per year!). This means I was flying somewhere every 3 weeks.
When Covid started I still managed to have one last repatriation flight before the total lockdowns. It was an unforgettable flight from Yerevan to Minsk, where Orest and I had to escape Belarusian border police with a taxi for 350km and finally were rescued by the Polish government.
The average of 1.5 flights per month fell to 0.2 flights per month after March 2022. I wonder whether my behaviour pattern has changed forever or whether I will get back to whizzing through Europe every month.
Let’s see. I also mapped the flights using Openflights.
As you can see, Warsaw is the epicenter of all my life activity. You can also see that I have never travelled very far, with the longest flights being Warsaw - Tenerife. The northernmost airport being Tallin, the southernmost being Hurghada, the westernmost being Tenerife, and the easternmost being Almaty. My most frequent city to fly to or from is Warsaw with a whopping 60% (228 out of 381) of flights. Then #2 is Moscow at 52, #3 Malaga at 36, #4 Kiev at 29, #5 Munich at 25. Interestingly, Britain is not represented at all in the top ranking, although there were ~100 flights from or to the UK. This is because my universities did not have primary airports, and I took advantage of Britain’s wealth of extremely scattered secondary airports, and flew from places such as Stansted, Gatwick, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Manchester etc.
Let me know if you have any interesting data analysis ideas that I could with this. Or maybe some cool visualisations that could be done in one winter evening!
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