I have had a hard time googling this.
Basically, how many commercial airline flights are there per year, worldwide?
Let’s not count small aircraft. Say, only aircraft with 100+ passenger capacity.
Also, if the correct number is difficult to come by, an order-of-magnitude estimate would be good.
My guess is roughly 3,000 flights per day, so roughly 1 million commercial airline flights per year.
Is this correct?
This site shows about 9 million commercial flights a year in the U.S. alone. I don’t know how many of those are smaller commercial flights. I am also not sure about the world at large.
American Airlines has approximately 2,200 flights per day (that is mainline only, not including American Eagle).
American Airlines and American Eagle departures combined would easily exceed 3,000 per day.
But Eagle flies nothing larger than a 70-seat jet, so let’s not count them.
If you are looking for an order-of-magnitude guess, how’s this: take the 2,200 flights per day of AA and multiply it by 10. That’s 22,200 flights per day by US carriers. These flights are often international, so the global total is more than 22,200 per day but nowhere near double it. Let’s say an additional 10,000 flights per day by non-US based carriers.
32,200 flights per day x 365 days = 11,753,000 flights per year. This is higher than the numbers in Shagnasty’s link, but we’ve eliminated small aircraft and added non-US carriers. All my numbers after the AA stats are WAGs on my part, but they’re probably in the ballpark.