Up in the air
Question: While discussing holiday flying arrangements, a friend and I began
to speculate on how many people throughout the world, on average, are flying in
an aircraft at any one time. What proportion of the world’s population does this
represent?
Answer: According to the International Air Transport Association in Geneva,
1.557 billion people were carried on flights throughout the world in 1999. If
this figure is divided by the number of days in a year, we can calculate there
are 4,265,753 passengers in the air throughout the course of a day. This is
0.071…
