In the age of self-surveillance, there’s hardly something left we don’t measure. We depend our steps, our screen time, our REM cycles, our “productive hours” and even our emotional temperatures. There are individuals who can let you know, to the minute, how long they’ve slept this 12 months — and others who can let you know, to the minute, how lengthy they’ve spent suspended over the Atlantic at 35,000 toes in seat 14A.
Flighty, a flight monitoring app that has racked up lots of of hundreds of customers after going viral on social media, tells you not solely when your aircraft will go away, however the place it is, what plane kind you’re flying, how punctual it’s been in the previous 60 days, and what time it’s prone to board. It exhibits your aircraft’s earlier route, predicts delays earlier than the airline does, and builds an intricate digital portrait of your flying life, full with maps, flight paths, and passport-style stat playing cards.
With Flighty launching its first ever world passport report, highlighting information from over 22 million world flights – masking 34 billion miles – social media feeds are filling with individuals posting theirs: shiny rectangles itemizing flights taken, miles travelled, hours delayed — the aviation world’s reply to Spotify Wrapped, besides as an alternative of most performed tracks, you get most visited airports.
Launched quietly in 2015 as a easy net characteristic known as Year in Music, Spotify’s retrospective morphed, over the years, right into a full-blown annual cultural occasion. By the late 2010s, it had turn into a seasonal spectacle, full with pastel gradients, personalised graphics, and the dopamine hit of the ‘top artists you listened to most’. It did one thing genius: it reworked personal consumption into public identification.
Leon Öttl
Leon Öttl
The impact was prompt and far-reaching. Within a number of years, Wrapped had successfully invented a new social media moment: the Year in Review season. Apple adopted with Apple Music Replay. Strava unveiled its Year in Sport summaries, Duolingo started charting “words learned” and “streaks maintained”, whereas Headspace supplied “Minutes of Mindfulness”. Even Uber now sends passengers personalised “Rider Recaps” charting their most-visited neighbourhoods, prime routes, and peak travel hours.
It grew to become, in impact, the mirrorball second for information: the one time of 12 months we truly need to have a look at our metrics. And when Flighty’s passport characteristic launched in 2023, it did the identical for frequent fliers — shortly taking off amongst those that rack up many hundreds of hours in the air every year.
Reddit spawned video games like Guess My Home Base, the place customers put up their profiles and others attempt to deduce their metropolis from their flight map. Download spikes arrive not throughout vacation seasons or snowstorms, when monitoring options are at their most helpful, however throughout “passport season”: the week in December when travellers take to social media to match who’s spent the most time in transit.