How many people LIVE up there?

Question

If there are about 1647 international airports in the world and there is a plane landing at each one of them every minute (60 *24 = 1440) that's 2,371,680 planes landing on back on earth every minute. If each carries 500 people, that means there's over ONE BILLION PEOPLE living 7 miles up in the sky every second of the day. WTF!!!???

Answer 1

Wrong premise.

Answer 2

WTF are you talking about! first of all the vast majority of international airports dont have a plane landing every minute and even the busy ones like LHR which can give you a minimum of 3nm on finals means it lands aircraft every minute and a half. secondly, what plane carried 500 ppl?? the vast majority of aircraft are small and medium size which carry around 150 ppl.

Answer 3

nnnnnnnnnnnnno

Answer 4

ok... firstly there are airplanes that can carry almost 850 people (airbus a380), if configured to carry that many. Also, not every international airport has a plane landing every minute, the best way to work this out is everyday worldwide 70,000 planes take off and land, thats roughly 1 (0.81) planes a second, so every hour there would be approx. 2916 planes taking off, assuming each plane was carrying 200 passengers, that means within that hour there are/were 583,200 people in the sky (its a rough figure, as not every plane will be carry 200 people, and the statistics include cargo and military planes).

So.... every second of the day there would probably be over 600,000 people in the sky at that specific second. But that figure could be way out, you'll never really know, just remember that 70,000 planes take off a day, and land, approx 1 a second.

Answer 5

Um, your assumptions are off by several orders of magnitude.

First of all, there aren't 2,371,680 planes in the world. Only the few busiest airports have those many landings while most others don't have nearly as many. There are no airliners that carry 500 people; the average capacity is under 150 and most of them are half empty most of the time anyway.

More realistically, given that there are about 20,000 airliners in the world, fewer than a quarter in the air at any given time and the average passenger load being close to 70 people there are probably fewer than 300,000 people in the air at any time.

If your assumptions were correct, then most people in the world would be air traffic controllers, airline pilots, or aircraft maintenance engineers.