AA By the Numbers: What I Want to Track Across a Year of Business Travel

A dashboard only matters if it changes a decision. Here’s what I’m tracking across a year of American Airlines travel, and why the pattern matters more than any single number.

I’ve never been much of a spreadsheet guy. For most of my flying life, the closest thing I kept to a travel record was a stack of boarding passes in a jacket pocket and a rough sense that this had been “a rough month for connections.” That worked fine when I was flying occasionally. It stopped working once American Airlines became the backbone of how I run my businesses.

Somewhere in the last few years, my flying crossed a threshold. It’s frequent enough that individual trips blur together, and vague impressions stop being useful. “Charlotte connections always feel tight” is not the same as knowing which specific flight pairings actually run tight and which ones just feel that way because of one bad afternoon. That’s the gap I want AA By the Numbers to close.

Why Track Any of This at All

I want to be honest about the motivation, because the obvious wrong answer is vanity. This isn’t about publishing an impressive-looking number of segments or a mileage total that reads like a brag. Nobody needs another site that treats a loyalty statement like a trophy case.

The real reason is simpler and more useful: patterns tell you things that memory doesn’t. If I fly the same regional-to-hub routing forty times over a year, the tenth flight and the thirtieth flight will feel like isolated events in the moment. But looked at together, they’ll tell me things no single trip can — which connection windows are genuinely safe, which aircraft types are worth requesting, whether paying for an upgrade actually correlates with a materially better outcome, or whether I’m just telling myself a story that happens to be flattering.

One bad connection is an anecdote. Forty connections are a pattern — and patterns are what actually change how you book a trip.

What I Actually Want to Track

The Flight Log on this site captures the raw records — date, route, aircraft, cabin, seat, timing. AA By the Numbers is where those records turn into something you can read at a glance. The categories I care about most:

Route and Airport Reliability

Which routings hold their scheduled connection time, and which ones look fine on paper but run tight in practice because of gate distances, taxi times, or a hub that’s chronically busy at a certain hour. This is the single most practical thing a frequent flyer can know about their own travel pattern.

Aircraft Mix

What I’m actually flying, not what I assume I’m flying. It’s easy to think of a route as “the regional jet route” and be wrong about it a third of the time.

Upgrade Requests vs. Upgrade Clears

This is the number I’m most curious about, because it’s the one most clouded by memory bias. A cleared upgrade is memorable. A missed one is forgettable. Tracked honestly over enough flights, the real clear rate — by route, by day of week, by how far in advance I requested it — should say more than any single upgrade story could.

On-Time Performance, By Route

Not as a grievance list, but as an input to how I build a trip. Some routes deserve a buffer connection. Others don’t need one nearly as often as I assumed.

Lounge Visits, Hotel Nights, and Rental-Car Days

The parts of the trip that don’t involve an aircraft but absolutely shape how the trip feels. A year that includes forty flights probably also includes a meaningful number of lounge stops, hotel stays, and rental pickups, and those experiences deserve the same kind of honest tracking as the flights themselves.

Figures above are illustrative examples of the kind of tracking this page will show — not Brad’s verified historical record.

None of those numbers are a claim about my actual year. They’re a mockup of the shape this data will eventually take — a stand-in for the format until enough real, logged flights accumulate to make the picture meaningful. I’d rather show you an honest placeholder than dress up a guess as a verified statistic.

What This Isn’t For

I want to be direct about what AA By the Numbers is not going to become. It’s not a status-chasing scoreboard, and it’s not going to be framed around any specific elite tier, spend figure, or credit-card portfolio. Those specifics are mine to know and, where they’re relevant to a story, to share carefully and honestly — not to inflate into a running leaderboard for its own sake.

It’s also not going to replace the actual articles on this site. A number can tell you that a connection runs tight fourteen percent of the time. It can’t tell you what it’s like to sprint a concourse in dress shoes, or why a specific gate agent made a bad afternoon better. That’s still the job of the writing. The numbers are there to sharpen the questions, not to answer them on their own.

For now, consider this the opening entry in a running project: build the tracking habit, be honest about what the data does and doesn’t show, and let a real year of flying — not a guess about one — fill in the picture over time.