3 ms·

This doesn't sound right. Would like to see the numbers.

• objclxt 9y ago
  Seems pretty reasonable to me. There can be 9-10,000 flights in the sky at any one time (go check out any of the flight radar/tracking sites).
• tzs 9y ago
  Note that as written, it would include crew and passengers of commercial airlines, crew of cargo planes, passengers and crew on non-commercial flights, and passengers and crew on military flights. A bit of Googling only turned up data for passengers on commercial airlines, so let's just do those for now. At the end of 2013, according to the IATA, there were 8 million commercial passengers per day [1]. It looks like it has grown to about 12 million a day since then [2]. If the average flight is 2 hours or more, that would give an average of 1 million commercial airline passengers in the air at a given time. I didn't find any reasonable looking average world flight time data, but the impression I got is that 2 hours is probably in the ballpark. But that's just an average. At times it will be above that, and at times below it. Given the number of people and flights we are dealing with, I think that variation above and below would be fairly narrow. Thus, I think it is plausible that if cargo, military, and others were included that would be enough to push it to always over 1 million. [1] http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2013-12-30-01.aspx http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2013-12-30-01.aspx [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-passenger-traffic-globally/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...