Popular Misconceptions


The number of people flying over the US in a given hour

Posted by Frankie Roberto on the May 20th, 2007

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?