Air Travel

Question:

Just heard that on average about 61,000 people are airborne over North America at any given time. Can that be true? It seems high. Does anyone really know?

Response:

> Just heard that on average about 61,000 people are airborne over North > America at any given time. > Can that be true? It seems high. Does anyone really know?

What do you mean by "average"? Does that include the middle of the night? Let’s start with a moderate-size major, Southwest.  They have 300-some planes. Say each plane is in the air 70% of the time during 7am to 10pm.  If they are carrying fewer than 60 passengers per plane they are surely losing money – which WN doesn’t. That indicates that WN has about 12000 passengers in the air at once. Other major airlines have larger fleets, but few get such high utilization. It would only take 5 airlines carrying as many passengers as WN to meet your 61,000 people in the air at once. The number seems on the low side and must include 24-hour days, not just the 7am to 10pm hours. All of this forgets private and business aviation.

Response:

Lets look at the numbers. For August 2001 the airlines had passenger loads of (excuse the formatting please) (department of transportation stats): Alaska      1,417,000 America West      1,949,000 American      6,294,000 American Eagle      1,064,000 American Trans Air      714,000 Continental      3,487,000 Delta      8,728,000 Northwest      4,726,000 Southwest      8,122,000 TWA      1,933,000 United      6,822,000 US Airways      5,389,000  For a total of   50,645,000 passengers. That’s a bit over 1.6 million people a day, 68,000 per hour is you assume you can just divide the total per month by 31 and then by 24.  So yes, it’s believeable that the major domestics could have 61,000 people in the sky at any given hour.  This probably includes flights overseas, but doesn’t include any foreign carriers, so it would probably balance out and hold. This was pre september, so the numbers are probably higher then they are now.

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -> Just heard that on average about 61,000 people are airborne over North > America at any given time. > Can that be true? It seems high. Does anyone really know?

Response:

> Just heard that on average about 61,000 people are airborne over North > America at any given time. > Can that be true? It seems high. Does anyone really know?

Absolutely, it could be true.  In addition to the calculations other people have done, here’s another: There are about 270,000,000 people in the US.  If 61,000 of them are flying, that means 0.024% of them are in the air at once, or on average people spend 0.00024 * 365 = 0.0876 of a day in the air each year; that is, the average person spends 2.1 hours a year flying.  That doesn’t seem high to me. (I’ve assumed that air travel over North America is dominated by US citizens, but I think the numbers come out to be reasonable for any reasonable assumptions you make.) It’s always nice to see people questioning figures presented to them in newscasts, advertisements, etc.  It’s even nicer when, as in this case, you can easily work out some calculations yourself.

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