Since you’re here on our website, we’re sure that you love travel. Some of you may just enjoy getting from Point A to Point B. Others have a more subdued interest: yes, getting there is important, but it’s also fun and informational to know more about the flight, for example. One item of interest is knowing how old the plane is: some are decades old, but they still fly. That’s a testament to the quality of their original build, and also how the aircraft is maintained over its lifetime. While the average age of a U.S. domestic commercial airliner is 11 years old, it is not uncommon for aircraft to still be in service at 24, 25, even 30 years old.
But another interesting topic – our focus today – is where the aircraft fly, and how many of them are in the air at one time. Well, the answer to that is that it’s likely that there are anywhere between 7,782 and 8,755 commercial planes in the air on average at any given time these days. There is some seasonality to consider, though. Air service FlightRadar24.com tracks these kinds of things and noted this week that on Thursday, 6 July they tracked the highest number of commercial flights ever, following more than 134,000. We posted the map below the following day to illustrate the busy skies and we received numerous questions about the blank areas on the map. Why are there big holes in places around the world?
Firstly, look at the main image on this page, you’ll see a huge empty space over Europe: that is Ukraine and, as you would surmise, not many planes fly there. Other areas in conflict show the same way.
Which then brings us to the question of whether the airspace is crammed like a Tokyo bus, or are they more logically spaced out (that is, not spaced out, maaan.) As you might expect, they are rigidly monitored and managed by air traffic control teams around the world.
If you’ve gotten this far in the post, you’ll probably want to learn more. Click here to visit FlightRadar24.com to see how complex travel management can be. And be thankful for the teams who work hard at all of the world’s airports to keep you safe.
