Today I’m looking at MyFlightradar24, a great way to track your flight history. Up until a few weeks ago I’d personally never bothered keep track of the flights I’ve taken. Considering I run a flight reviewing channel/blog that information is useful, but I’ve forgotten most of the details of flights from more than a few years ago. That’s where MyFlightradar24 comes in! By just entering a flight number and date it automatically finds other flight details like airline, flight time, aircraft type etc. It also creates a map showing your flight history and makes a cool infographic pooling together all of your trips.
In this article I’ll be briefly going over what MyFlightradar24 is, how to use it, and my results for this year so far.
What is MyFlightradar24?
As they put it on their own website “myFlightradar24 is the perfect place to keep track of your flights and compile detailed statistics about your travels. You can even help fellow travelers by leaving reviews of flights you take and airports you visit”.
It does the same thing as a lot of flight logging services like logmytrip.net. And honestly, I haven’t done a lot of research into MyFlightradar24’s competitors so don’t know how they compare. However, what does make MyFlightradar24 unique is that it’s owned by Flightradar24.com. If you’re at all interested in plane spotting of flight tracking then you’ll know about them. And being able to seamlessly integrate the two websites is great. It means Flightradar24 can seve all of your flight tracking needs in one website. You can hop between tracking a live flight to logging a past flight. And of all the flight tracking websites they probably have access to the most amount of accurate data.
How to Add Flights
All you need to do to start adding flights is to enter your departure date and flight number. It will then be able to automatically populate all of your flight’s information. I’m not sure exactly how far it keeps track of flight data, but I was able to enter info for flights I took 6 months earlier and it still knew the details. MyFlightradar24 will be able to tell you the departure and arrival time, flight duration, departure/arrival airport and even aircraft registration.
However, I did find that flight information will only go back so far. For the flights I entered, it was only able to find the aircraft registration on flights taken within the last month. And only able to pull the departure/arrival times for flights taken within the last year. Still impressive, but if you plan to enter your flight information going back a year or more just note that not all the information will be available.
For each flight you enter you can also add additional information such as class travelled, where you sat and why you travelled. I’m not really sure how useful this specific feature is, but it’s there at least.
Personally I’m not really concerned about these exact details so usually skip it. I care more about the map features.
Finally, it gives you the option to review each aspect of your flight. So for the example flight I took from Hong Kong to London Heathrow it lets you review both airports, the airline and the aircraft. For each of those options you can then give further ratings on stuff like check-in experience, food, etc and also write a quick review. They then collate all their user reviews on the standard flightradar24.com. Here’s the review page for British Airways as an example. It can be useful when deciding which airlines/airports you want to fly in the future.
My Stats
As an example, here are all the flights I’ve taken in the first 6 months of 2023. A whopping 35k miles and over 83 hours in the air. I was somewhat surprisesd it’s that much actually. But considering I’ve taken two seperate trips to South East Asia this year it makes sense.
It was also somewhat eye opening to see how much greenhouse gas emissions I’ve been contributing towards. According to Our World in Data, the average UK citizen emits just over 5 tonnes of C02 a year. So my figure of 7 tonnes so far does not bode well. Especially considering that’s just from flights and doesn’t include emissions from my day to day life.
Also, reviews for all of the flights below can be found on my website, so check them out if interested. That includes reviews for Cathay Pacific, Malaysia Airlines, British Airways, Vietnam Airlines, Luxair, Iberia, Air Asia and more!
More Detailed Stats
If you want to dig deeper into the data then there’s still plenty to see. It will list off the top 7 (not sure why they chose 7) in each category. So from the below you can see that my most flown airline this year is British Airways, despite how much I tend to complain about them. Some of these charts are based off data you have to manually enter though, like which seat you sat in and your reason for travelling. Sometimes I got lazy so didn’t always enter a reason for these, but being able to see them is cool nonetheless.
The only issue I found was that when entering flights from over a year ago it couldn’t always identify the aircraft or airline. I tried to add every route I’ve flown over my entire life to the map. I can’t remember most of the airlines or aircraft for those so a lot of the historical flights going back 20 years or so have very incomplete information. But from 2023 onwards at least I will be able to keep an accurate log.
Bottom Line
MyFlightradar24 is just a really cool way to track all the flights you’ve taken. It gives a great visual representation and feels satisfying to slowly paint the map with more and more flights. By being able to just enter a flight number and date it also takes away a lot of the tediousness of tracking flights manually and it can accurately pull data from flights taken up to a year ago.
I would like to see slightly more details, especially around envrionmental stats. Being able to see C02, methane and NO emissions is good. But it would be even better if you could do stuff like compare your annual emissions to the average person. Or maybe if it gave comparisions, e.g. that flight was equivalent to 100 cows burping for a week. Also I’d be happy if they added a 3D globe option rather than the standard 2D map. But overall I’m satisfied and will keep using it to track my flights.
More from me…
Please feel free to check out other related posts I’ve written:
- How to survive a long airport layover – tips and tricks
- Should you fly direct or with a layover?
- The best and worst airliners to fly on (in my opinion)
And if you fancy earning some fantastic rewards and Avios points through American Express, please use my referral links below:
- The Platinum Card – You Receive 50,000 Membership Reward points after spending £6,000 in the first 6 months: https://americanexpress.com/en-gb/referral/fREDEGgRA5?CPID=100493012
- British Airways Card: You Receive 8,000 Avios after spending £1,000 in the first 3 months: https://americanexpress.com/en-gb/referral/fREDEG42lN?CPID=100503089