10,000 thundering jet engines

In case you're wondering where the statistic about how many planes fill our skies every sixty seconds in the Green Thing Stay Grounded film came from, here's how we got there.

(Incidentally, we publish all our findings on the Green Thing Wiki  if you haven't yet ventured into our research vaults).

One of the best figures we found for number of airborne aircraft over the US was 5549. Of the top 30 busiest airports in the world, 17 of them are in the States: 17 out of 30 = 56%. So 5549 represents about 56% of the total number of planes in the air. So that would make the approximate total number of planes in the air 9,908 (i.e. 5549/0.56).

Another source cited an Aviation Weekly report that worldwide there are between 8000 - 13000 planes in the sky at any one moment; another extrapolated the US figure to around 10,000 worldwide (this last figure was on an aviation forum)

We thought the number of planes in the sky at a 'given moment' and 'per minute' amount to pretty much the same thing given that flights are of the order of hours, and I'd say flights and landings cancel each other out pretty much.

And just as a point of interest – or environmental depression - there are around 2.51 million flights globally every month, which works out to 83667 every day, 3486 every hour or 58 taking off every minute, so about 1 every second (on average). The video above is a simulation of global air traffic over 24 hours.

And apropos of nothing, tomorrow it will be three months precisely since the last International Day of the Air Traffic Controller. Is there a 'day' for everything in this world? Apparently so.

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