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Comment by 7373737373 | Hacker News Reader

> 11% of the world’s population took a flight

That sounds implausible to me. Perhaps by dividing the number of flights by the world population. But I can't conceive more than 800,000,000 different people flying last year

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Looking for references, this seems realistic. According to Boeing's then CEO Dennis Muilenburg in 2017 "Less than 20 percent of the world’s population has ever taken a single flight" [0]. I couldn't find a clear figure for how many unique people fly at least once a year. So while the specific number would be up for debate, I think the order of magnitude sounds reasonable.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/07/boeing-ceo-80-percent-of-peo...

There are lots of people in the world. Remember that when people talk about "the 1%" they might as well say "the richest hundred million people" (both numbers are round and approximately equal). "The 1%" conjures up a picture of champagne on the yacht in St. Tropez, but there are lots of people in the world.

Yeah, or people flying on business trips. Some people fly and then stay in a hotel, instead of driving back and forth each day.

And some people commute by airplane every day.

Anyone flying can do work and possibly better humanity in the air. Anyone driving is at best picking songs and at worst texting.

A neutral-looking source [0] indicates that in 2019, about 4.5 billion passengers boarded in total; 11% of the total world population flying at least once a year seems plausible with that figure.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...

This counts number of travels taken, not unique people. If you took 3 flights that year, you would count as 3 passengers in that statistic.

Right. So one source saying 4.5 billion passengers, and one saying 800 million unique passengers. Those numbers look at least roughly reasonable in comparison with each other. If the "average" passenger took 5 flights, then that adds up 4 billion passenger-flights. So the fat tail can be caused by the outliers taking dozens of flights.

Middle East countries have millions of workers from India to Philippines. A quick fact from Wikipedia "In 2013, the UAE had the fifth-largest international migrant stock in the world with 7.8 million migrants (out of a total population of 9.2 million)". Most of them visit their native places once or twice a year. A big fraction of Indians work thousands of kilometers away from home and also need intra-country transportation.

Apparently they're were about 40 million commercial flights per year pre-COVID. If we assume the average flight has 150 seats available (that may be too low?) that's 6 billion seats available for sale each year.

Most flights are return trips, so that 6bn seats corresponds to 3bn potential unique people. Then there's the percentage of multi-leg trips. (For example, on my most recent Athens-Istanbul-Stockholm return trip, I alone took 6 seats total).

Finally, we have to consider the percentage of flights taken by people who fly more than once a year, which probably represents a majority of seats.

All in all, it probably still lines up with 10%. It's shockingly high to me as well…

Source: TFA

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