I started flying hang gliders in 1985, paragliders in 1992. Virtually every flight I've ever done is logged, the early days in those little red flight log books from USHGA, later in a notebook on pre-printed accounting sheets, then on printed forms I laid out in a word processor. When I started test flying for Wills Wing I logged notes in little notepads that I would then transcribe to my forms. Photos are of whatever I saw that day; may show the glider flown in the log, may show other gliders or a track log.
Around 1998 I switched from paper logs to an Excel spreadsheet, which is why the details logged change. I've imported many flights from Wills Wing's records, and filled-in info from my logs.
In 2001 I got a Handspring Visor PDA and set up a memo format for logging test flights with that, for later copy-and-paste transcription. Eventually I transferred my Excel spreadsheet to a PostGreSQL database, with awk and bash scripts that would read the PDA and update the database, plus an Open Office form for entering and editing flights directly. I went with PostGres to force myself to learn about using it, as I was already familiar with Access and MySQL. In 2005 I got a Garmin Geko GPS, adding another layer to my flight logging. Here in April 2007 I've just exported the PostGreSQL database to MySQL.
[Jan 2025 - transcription complete! Almost 2 month's work.]
I do plan to transcribe the logs from the various notebooks, working backwards, but I'm not in any hurry to do that :) Another low-priority task will be to correlate my logs with Wills Wing's production database, because I only started recording the serial numbers of the gliders I flew in 9/99. I've already made some headway on that - imported info on gliders flown from mid-1995 through 12/1997; should be relatively easy to fill in the details from my written logs (filling in details for all of 1997 took several sessions.). I have later WW info prepared to xref with my logs, but it'll take some hunting for discrepancies and pondering to get them all sorted out. I'll defer to WW records where there are outright conflicts. The layout of this page will surely change quite a bit - probably tabs for the individual years with another pane for showing my comments and other recorded details of a flight.
I'll add some statistical info and counts of gliders flown and such as I feel motivated or think of coding variations. Since my flying is split between test-fly days, where I do 3-6 flights of anywhere from 5-25 minutes, and fun flying where I fly once for 1-2 hours, overall averages would be rather meaningless. Splitting the flights into various classes will help, but that's another task (HG vs. PG aren't even currently distinguished - you have to know the models).
I'll add keys for my abbreviations of sites and models flown. The models listed as 'Falcon KLH' are the one of the two Falcon 225's I've owned and use for fun flights and tandems.
So the flight logs here go back to 1985. Back in the mid-90's I had several years running of 100-150 hours airtime. That dropped off a bit as domestic-bliss-related things took over, including long summer vacations. The bliss stopped in early 2004, so annual airtime has picked up again. Market started dropping-off in 2008. WW ceased operations 2021.
Numerous flights from 1996 have no airtime info yet.