The year I flew somewhere new every month
This is every flight I can still dig up a record of, going back to 2003. It comes to 75 flights and 102,678 miles, which sounds like a lot until you realise the whole lot adds up to barely 10.2 days actually off the ground. For ages it was a couple of flights a year, then it went a bit mad. Here's the shape of it.
- Flights
- 75
- Miles flown
- 102,678
- Days in the air
- 10.2
- Countries
- 20
01/The shape of it
A couple of flights a year, then it went mad.
For most of these 23-odd years I flew about twice a year, usually a holiday out and the same holiday back. Then in 2023 I suddenly took 17 flights, and the year before wasn't far off either. That isn't me getting rich, it's a daft little project I set myself, which I'll get to. The headline is just how lumpy it is: years of nothing much, then a great big spike.
- Flights on record
- 75
- Miles flown
- 102,678
- Days in the air
- 10.2
- Hours aloft
- 244
02/Flights a year
The spike you can't miss.
Plotted by year it's pretty stark. A flat little run of twos and threes, a gap where covid grounded everyone in 2021, and then 2023 sticking up like a sore thumb. The miles don't track it neatly either: a single long-haul out to the States does more for the mileage total than a whole summer of short European hops.
03/A new city a month
My twelve months of coffee.
So here's the daft project, the one I called my twelve months of coffee. For a year I flew off to a different European city more or less every month, on my own, to work from a coffee shop in a city I'd never been to. I'm self-employed, so I just took the laptop and went: Milan, Copenhagen, Berlin, Skopje, Prague, then Barcelona, Zurich, Lisbon, Budapest. Cheap flights, hostels, a few days each, then home and do it all again the next month.
That one idea is basically the whole spike. It's why 2023 has 17 flights in it, and why nearly all of them are short out-and-back hops rather than anything glamorous.
One city a month, solo, on a budget, working as I went. Most of the flights in here are just me chasing that.
04/Longest and shortest
My longest and shortest flights, from the same trip.
Funny one, this. My longest ever flight is LHR to LAS at 5,216 miles (February 2022), and my shortest is DFW to AUS at just 191 miles, a quick hop you'd barely call a flight. Both were on the same trip: a big loop around the US visiting friends, where I ended up flying everywhere because it's the only sensible way to get about over there.
- Longest, LHR to LAS
- 5,216 mi
- Shortest, DFW to AUS
- 191 mi
- Total miles flown
- 102,678
- Times round the planet
- 4.12x
05/The home airport
Nearly everything goes through Gatwick.
I live near LGW, and it shows: it turns up in 54 of my 75 flights, which is 72% of the lot. The next busiest airport only appears 6 times. Gatwick isn't anyone's idea of a glamorous hub, but it's a twenty-five-minute drive and it flies cheaply to half of Europe, which is exactly what the whole twelve months of coffee needed.
06/The reach
One airport, but the map still fills up.
For all that one airport does the heavy lifting, it's still got me to 39 airports across 20 countries, with 63 of the 75 flights crossing a border. Here's everywhere I've actually touched down.
Those lines touch down in a fair spread of places, from quick hops across the Channel to the odd long-haul that snuck in. Here's the full set, one flag each:
07/Budget travel
Cheap airlines are how I see Europe.
None of this works without budget airlines. 
easyJet alone is 36% of my flights (27 of them), and once you add the other low-cost lot it's about half of everything I've flown. That's the whole method really: no-frills carriers are what made twelve months of coffee actually affordable, so I just put up with the orange seats and the 6am departures.
- On easyJet
- 36%
- On budget airlines
- 44%
- Different airlines
- 16
08/The fleet
A lot of little Airbuses, and one giant.
All those short hops mean I've spent most of my flying life on the same handful of small planes: Airbus A319 and its close cousins do the bulk of the work. But I've been on 19 different aircraft types in total, and the fun ones are right at the bottom of the list.
The treats were the rare wide-bodies. I've flown the Airbus A380 exactly once (October 2022, coming back from the States), the only double-decker in here, and a couple of old Boeing 747s on a family holiday to Jamaica back in 2009. After a steady diet of easyJet A319s, stepping onto a jumbo feels faintly ridiculous.
09/Where I sit
A window-seat person, clearly.
Of the flights where I noted it down, I picked a window seat 56% of the time, with aisle and middle splitting the rest. I'll happily climb over a whole row of people just to get my head against the glass and watch the ground go by. Some habits really don't budge.
10/Work trips
The only proper work flights are once a year.
Almost all of this is me travelling for fun: only 11 flights were actually for work. They're all the same thing, a WordPress conference called WordCamp Europe that lands in a new city every June. Porto, Athens, Turin, Basel, Krakow, one each year, always the first week of the month. Everything else, the twelve months of coffee included, was purely for me.
- Personal flights
- 64
- Work flights
- 11
- Flown for work
- 15%
11/The gaps
Still flying, still keeping the log.
The empty stretches tell their own story. There's the obvious one in 2021, when covid grounded everybody, and then the long quiet gap of about 3 years (August 2006 to April 2009), which is really just where the old records run out rather than a spell of staying put.
My very first flight on record was LGW to FUE back in 2003, and the most recent was only 8 June 2026. I'll keep adding to this as I go, and I refresh the story every now and then, so the date up top is how current these numbers are.