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The 1% figure sounds insane, but remember that "11% of the world’s population took a flight in 2018". In other words, about 10% of the flyers cause half of avia
by itcrowd 6y ago
The 1% figure sounds insane, but remember that "11% of the world’s population took a flight in 2018". In other words, about 10% of the flyers cause half of aviation emissions.
- 7373737373 6y ago> 11% of the world’s population took a flight That sounds implausible to me. Perhaps by dividing the number of flights by the world population. But I can't conceive more than 800,000,000 different people flying last year
- itcrowd 6y agoSource: TFA
- Etheryte 6y agoLooking for references, this seems realistic. According to Boeing's then CEO Dennis Muilenburg in 2017 "Less than 20 percent of the world’s population has ever taken a single flight" [0]. I couldn't find a clear figure for how many unique people fly at least once a year. So while the specific number would be up for debate, I think the order of magnitude sounds reasonable. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/07/boeing-ceo-80-percent-of-people-never-flown-for-us-that-means-growth.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/07/boeing-ceo-80-percent-of-peo...
- postingawayonhn 6y agoApparently they're were about 40 million commercial flights per year pre-COVID. If we assume the average flight has 150 seats available (that may be too low?) that's 6 billion seats available for sale each year.
- scrollaway 6y agoMost flights are return trips, so that 6bn seats corresponds to 3bn potential unique people. Then there's the percentage of multi-leg trips. (For example, on my most recent Athens-Istanbul-Stockholm return trip, I alone took 6 seats total). Finally, we have to consider the percentage of flights taken by people who fly more than once a year, which probably represents a majority of seats. All in all, it probably still lines up with 10%. It's shockingly high to me as well…
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoA neutral-looking source [0] indicates that in 2019, about 4.5 billion passengers boarded in total; 11% of the total world population flying at least once a year seems plausible with that figure. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-passenger-traffic-globally/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...
- Etheryte 6y agoThis counts number of travels taken, not unique people. If you took 3 flights that year, you would count as 3 passengers in that statistic.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SamBam 6y agoRight. So one source saying 4.5 billion passengers, and one saying 800 million unique passengers. Those numbers look at least roughly reasonable in comparison with each other. If the "average" passenger took 5 flights, then that adds up 4 billion passenger-flights. So the fat tail can be caused by the outliers taking dozens of flights.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Arnt 6y agoThere are lots of people in the world. Remember that when people talk about "the 1%" they might as well say "the richest hundred million people" (both numbers are round and approximately equal). "The 1%" conjures up a picture of champagne on the yacht in St. Tropez, but there are lots of people in the world.
- robertlagrant 6y agoYeah, or people flying on business trips. Some people fly and then stay in a hotel, instead of driving back and forth each day.
- aitchnyu 6y agoMiddle East countries have millions of workers from India to Philippines. A quick fact from Wikipedia "In 2013, the UAE had the fifth-largest international migrant stock in the world with 7.8 million migrants (out of a total population of 9.2 million)". Most of them visit their native places once or twice a year. A big fraction of Indians work thousands of kilometers away from home and also need intra-country transportation.
- jessriedel 6y agoYep. And 87% of American Airlines passengers fly “once a year or less.” https://thepointsguy.com/2017/09/american-airlines-amazing-stats/ https://thepointsguy.com/2017/09/american-airlines-amazing-s...
- itcrowd 6y agoThat is for Americal Airlines (the company) only. The number of American (adults) that never fly is about 53%. See Fig. 7 in the research paper linked in this article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378020307779#f0030 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
- jessriedel 6y agoI capitalized "Airlines" for a reason, but I would guess it's pretty representative for the country. The reason your number and my number are different is not because AA is an unusual airline, but because the two numbers are about completely different things. There are three groups of Americans: (A) those that don't fly in a given year, (B) those that fly once, and (C) those that fly multiple times. Roughly, your number is A/(A+B+C) while mine is B/(B+C).
- itcrowd 6y agoI wasn't disagreeing with you, I was adding to your information. It seems about 87%-53% = 34% of Americans fly once a year.
- Invictus0 6y agoYou can reasonably expect that that "one time" is a round-trip as well.
- globular-toast 6y agoIt wasn't clear from the article, but wouldn't "aviation emissions" also include emissions from goods transport, not just passenger transport?
- itcrowd 6y agoIt is more clear from the research paper linked in the article. The distribution of emissions is about commercial passengers (71%), freight (17%), military (8%) and private airplanes (4%). See Fig. 1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378020307779 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
- Shivetya 6y agoand this break down can only be based on what is accurately reported and military numbers rarely ever will be. Taxing aviation fuel can resolve the issue of the industry properly paying for their pollution but focusing on only a small set of fliers won't fix anything other than accentuate existing class tensions. China and other countries did not report numbers so any analysis will be pure guesswork. The flat out comparison to miles flown by those on the continent of Africa exposes the nature of these types of studies. They have their observation written before the numbers are assembled. To be honest the article is relying on the "one percent" theme which has been an all to common politically led class warfare action by which new policies and taxes are to be implemented under the guise of only targeting a limited set of people but in fact will impact many more and expanded at will once in place. Class warfare is a common method to get a foot in the door. By incessantly portraying all problems as caused by "one percent" it becomes very easy to implement fees and taxes which will naturally have expand to include more than the "one percent" as the revenue will never meet the promised numbers.
- rorykoehler 6y agoI bet most of it is business flights. So many pointless flights to go to pointless meetings in person.
- TYPE_FASTER 6y agoIt will be really interesting to compare pre-COVID 2019 vs. 2022 statistics for markets like business travel.
- rorykoehler 6y agoThis data is a core part of the data we have at work. We are expecting a massive spike way above the previous norm when travel opens up (soon in some places and later in others), followed by levels 50-80% (my finger in the air guesstimate... we haven't tried to model this) pre-covid as more people take video calls instead of flights now that they are used to it.
- hackeraccount 6y agoSurely they aren't all pointless. I think figuring out which flights are and which have a value to the business is a bit trickier to figure out then you suppose.
- rorykoehler 6y agoI flew from Berlin to Australia for a meeting and the person I was supposed to meet never even turned up because he pull an all nighter trying to meet a deadline the night before. Luckily it wasn't the only reason for the trip but it could have easily been. Good times.