It’s said a journey traveled is best measured in friends rather than miles. When your journey lasts 13 years, you avoid collecting new friends at every port, as you barely have time between flights for existing relationships. So I will stick to using miles and time to measure my most extraordinary voyage thus far, one I started in 2008 when I joined Emirates in Dubai as cabin crew.
The pandemic travel slump abruptly ended my career with the airline last year, and ever since, I’ve been wondering how many hours I clocked as a professional Fly Guy. Recently I started using Flighty App, a pilot-grade flight tracker app that does way more than track your plane. Looking over Flighty’s impressive app features and the data it logs automatically, I got inspired to dust off my 112-page crew duty report and get to calculating my travel stats.
Emirates is known for its 24-hour flight operations and ultra-long fights, which means their crew can work longer duty hours more frequently than crew based at other international airlines. Emirates also follows crew rest legalities set by their government’s agency similar to the FAA in USA. The rules of this organization tend to be less strict than in regions like the EU, which means rest periods between and after international flights can also be shorter compared to some airlines. I wasn’t surprised to see how many hours I spent above the clouds when I considered these facts.
I worked for just over 12 years with Emirates, and if you subtract vacation and sick leave, I was actively flying a bit more than 10 of those 12 years. Over that time, I spent… drumroll please… 10,377 hours on duty! That equals 433 days or 1.1 years living in the sky. This amount of time-averaged out to around 86.5 hours a month flying with an average flight length of 6.7 hours.
I flew 10,377 hours with Emirates, which equals to about 1.1 years of my life in the sky!
For the sake of this post, Flighty APP took this data and managed to backlog just my flights at Emirates. Here is how the app calculated the data into its impressive travel journaling feature offered on the free version, which I downloaded on the Apple App Store.
Another interesting statistic Flighty App automatically keeps track of is the countries and airports you visit most. These were the top 5 cities I flew to with Emirates!
From my Instagram:
