How many people/airliners are flying in airliners at any given time?
Is there any way to see an actual or estimate figure about how many people are flying (may be in airliners, only, if that helps) at a given point of time?
If there's an airplane's count instead of people (I don't expect that number to be public), that'd be enough, too.
Best Answer
There's a variety of ways of calculating this, and obviously it depends on seasons, time of day around the world, and some events affect it (Chinese New Year, for example).
This has been asked on Quora and the estimates range from 500,000 to 970,000, depending on mathematical calculations, estimates, or stats from Boeing or Flight tracker.
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Why Are There Still So Many Planes Flying?
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Answer 2
Check out https://www.flightradar24.com/, which shows all flights that are currently in the air. At the moment its 13628. If you assume an average of 100 passengers per flight (Wild guess), that comes out to be 1.4 million people in the air.
It's also interesting to observe how the flight patterns change throughout the day: at the moment (9am US east coast) the North Atlantic is almost entirely one way from Europe to the US. This will flip later afternoon.
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