On a normal day, roughly how many scheduled commercial flights take off around the world?
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Answer
About 100,000 flights
At busy moments more than 10,000 aircraft are in the air at once, carrying over a million people.
How to estimate it
Count aircraft and how hard they work. Airlines operate about 25,000 passenger jets and turboprops. Short-haul planes fly six or more legs a day while long-haul jets manage one or two, so take 4 flights per aircraft per day. 25,000 × 4 = 100,000 departures. Flight tracking services report about 100,000 scheduled commercial flights on a normal day.
Source: ICAO; IATA
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