I am an Airbus A350 Pilot
Since 2023, I have been a First Officer on the Airbus A350 with British Airways operating out of London Heathrow. Prior to this, I flew the Airbus A320 family based at Heathrow and Gatwick since 2016.
A career highlight has been flying with my father, who is a Captain on the A350 with BA.I joined British Airways through their cadet scheme in 2014, which included an Integrated ATPL course that I completed at FTEJerez in Andalucia, Spain 🇪🇸. My flying journey began in Canada 🇨🇦, where I obtained my Glider Pilot License, Instructor Rating, and my PPL through Canadian Air Cadet scholarships.
Flying Career Timeline
Integrated ATPL flight training on PA-28 and DA42. JOC/MCC course on B737.
Air Cadet PPL scholarship.
🏆 Top Pilot award.
Air Cadet glider pilot scholarship.
🏆 Top Pilot award.
Statistics
I log all of my flights digitally using LogTen Pro, which lets me query them using SQL and present them in infographic format. My favourite is the GitHub-style flying history.
Destination Matrix
The outer ring shows the number of flight to each country, and each band shows the number of flights to a country from a specific other country. You'll notice that some destinations do not have an equal number of departures or arrivals - this is due to positioning/deadhead sectors.
The single sector from Portugal to Spain was due to a diversion from Madeira to Tenerife in poor weather.
Flight Calendar
Programmers who use GitHub have access to a beautiful "activity graph" to visualise their daily code contributions.
Here is the pilot version: Colours correspond with the number of hours flown each day. Can you tell when Covid-19 kicked off? Or when I switched from short-haul to long-haul?
Annual Hours
How many hours have I been strapped into an aircraft each year? In aviation, we log time from "brakes off" to "brakes on". Some acronym definitions:
- P1/PIC: Pilot in Command
- P1US/PICUS: Pilot in Command, Under Supervision
- P2: Pilot 2
- Heavy: "Extra" pilot on long trips. On jump seat for take off and landing.
At British Airways, the P1 and P2 sectors are usually shared between Captains and FOs, and whoever is P1 "runs" the sector. The Captain is always in command throughout the sector, but FOs are empowered to make decisions and run sectors as PIC under supervision.
BA SOPs also dictate that every approach is flown as a monitored approach. At top of descent, the P2 will become Pilot Flying, and will fly the approach to 1000ft AGL, where P1 will retake control to land.
Cumulative Hours
The time per-aircraft is separated by ICAO Type Designator codes. The A320 family includes "CEO" (A320) and "NEO" (A32N) variants, in addition to A319 and A321 variants.
Flight Time vs Distance
One would expect flight time to increase linearly with distance, which is approximately true. However, due to prevailing winds, often the outbound and inbound flights from London have different times.
The distance measurement in this graph is the great circle distance between airports. You can graphically see that Westbound flights from London take longer outbound due to headwinds.