My friend Tony became very ill and was confined to home. Frustrated out of his mind, because he was unable to work, Tony rested and surfed the internet to satisfy his passion for all things “Boeing”. In fact his slogan was “if its not Boeing I ain’t going“.

It was Tony who got me to Seattle when Boeing first unveiled the 787. It was Tony who got me onto Flight memory.com

Four years ago, Tony rang me up: “got your frequent flyer statements?”
“yes”. I said.
“Good. Bring them round to my place”
“> “Why”.
“>”Don’t ask”.  So round went my frequent flier statements.

A couple of months later, he rang again, “when you were a kid, did you keep a record of your flights?”. Indeed, I had my BOAC Junior jet club book, which my parents had started with my first flight with BOAC in 1968.

One day when I was at work, Tony sent me a Skype message with one word: “incoming” with an accompanying link to my very own flightmemory.com page. This service is a method of keeping a record of all of a person’s flights. Flightmemory records:

• date and time of flights
• number of hours, kilometres and miles flown
• airline, plane, plane number and name
• seat and reason for travel
• my ratings of flights (something I have started doing more recently)

 

Tony had typed in several hundreds of these flights. He then maintained my flight memory until the month he died. Thank you my friend.

I have kept it up since. Thats how I can tell you the following:

• 100th flight in November 1996 was from Lismore to Sydney with Kendall airlines on a SAAB340
• 200th flight in October 2004 was from Sydney to Honolulu on an Air Canada 767
• 500th flight in April 2009 saw me on a United Airlines CRJ700
•  737th in May 2011 from Portland to Spokane on a Southwest 737

 

RIP Tony Chapman