The number of people flying over the US in a given hour
An e-mailed ‘list of facts’ which I received a few weeks back (and have been slowly going through here) contained the following claim:
The average number of people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000
Unfortunately, unlike some of the other ‘facts’ I’ve looked at so far, I’ve neither been able to verify nor disprove this one. As a simple statistic, it shouldn’t be too difficult to work out, but that does require some good data (and a better head for maths than I’ve probably got).
Can you help?
on March 10th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
As a pilot this looks false right off the bat, but lets do some math.
According to the NATCA, “At any given moment, roughly 5,000 planes are in the skies above the United States.” Also only about one third of those are commercial carriers, with another third being general aviation and the last being air taxi flights. We will leave out military and cargo flights for the sake of simplicity, as it shouldn’t change the numbers much (http://www.natca.org/mediacenter/bythenumbers.msp).
To further delve into how many people are in the sky we will break these numbers up a bit, of the approximately 1,666 General Aviation flights I think we can safely assume that there are between 1 and 2 people on board. Air taxi flights are a bit different, but I say 3 people per flight is a more then conservative estimate for that one. For the commercial airline world it’s a bit different I wasn’t able to find a site with any good info so here is my best guess. I took the data from both http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World’s_busiest_airports_by_passenger_traffic & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_traffic_movements, and divided total passengers by total movements for the 2006 stats then averaged the results what I got was an average of 90 passengers/movement. Now this should be a conservative estimate as total movements includes GA, Cargo, Military, Air Taxi, and Commercial flights. Since we are trying to find the average of just the commercial aviation flight passengers this will skew our results down a bit since most other flight types have fewer passengers. Also, this is from the busiest airports which of course are serviced by the largest planes from the airlines, so this would skew our results up as not as many small regional jets use the larger airports. Combining these two error sources I think it’s safe to assume that 90 people per plane is a conservative estimate and as a final checksum the best selling plane, the Boeing 737, can hold between 100-200 passengers depending on configuration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737).
So now that the assumptions have been explained here are the numbers.
General aviation flights 1,666 * 1.5 = 2,499
Air Taxi 1,666 * 3 = 4998
Commercial Aviation 1,666 * 90 = 149940
For a grand total of roughly 157,437 people in the air above the states at any given time.
This is the best I could do with what I found availible online.