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FlightMemory, a website that allows travelers to track their flight history, including airlines, plane types, seat class and other characteristics and generate statistics to compare with other travelers or use for other purposes. The statistics can also be used to compare a user's travel time and distance with distances such as circumnavigation of the earth.
FlightMemory is a project of the Heret Informatik Service in Germany. The original application in German was launched in 2005 and had over 15,000 registered users as of March 2007)[1]. The English version launched in April 2007[2] which resulted in the site being available to a greater audience of travelers. By May 2007, approximately one month after the debut of the site in English, there were 23,000 users worldwide, 10% of which were pilots[3].
Benefits
FlightMemory enables its users to keep track of where they have flown and subsequently produce maps showing the flight routes and other engaging information. The data, which users can enter manually or via an import tool, will track total time in the air, distance flown and even keep track of aircraft types and airlines. While frequent travelers are those most likely to use the site due to an interest in tracking their flights, there is no cost to use it and it is open to any users. In addition to making public information available in a greater range of languages, the creation of a Facebook application that takes advantage of the increased use of social networking sites will likely result in increased site use, which has already been occurring over the last three months[4].
Issues
The site is still under development, with the creators open to suggestions from the users and participating in various flight discussion forums. The prime concern that has been raised among users is that it's not possible to enter the same flight multiple times if it is flown routinely[5]. Further, there has been some criticism of it being too US-centric[6], a factor which may reflect the fact that some 50% of its users come from the US. While it is not a perfect site, it has been well received by frequent travelers.
Piggybacking on the success of FlightMemory, OpenFlights has popped up offering similar services and incorporating many of the functions for free, which flightmemory only offers to its "premium" (i.e. paying) users. Unlike FlightMemory, OpenFlights is open source and licensed under the Affero GPL. Another solution is the shareware software Flightmap, which offers comparable functionality, but works without internet connection.
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