live estimate
people flying right now
1,354,689people
0.016% of humanity
modelled estimate · updated every second · nothing here is actually being counted
flying since you opened this page
0
passengers flying every day
13,005,018
passengers taking off every second
151
by the numbers
aircraft in the air
10,417
aircraft worldwide
distance flown
2,314
km per second
Are you flying right now?
Nobody is counting the world. We can count you, though.
confirmed flyers today0 people
said not right now1 person
See what's happening in your country
We only use your location to work out your country. We don't store your address.
by country — right now
| country | local time | awake | people |
|---|---|---|---|
| India | 06:48 | 25% | 241,385 |
| China | 09:18 | 93% | 231,940 |
| United States | 20:18 | 85% | 56,359 |
| Indonesia | 08:18 | 85% | 47,114 |
| Pakistan | 06:18 | 25% | 42,085 |
| Nigeria | 02:18 | 3% | 39,167 |
| Brazil | 22:18 | 50% | 35,092 |
| Bangladesh | 07:18 | 60% | 28,970 |
| Russia | 04:18 | 3% | 23,665 |
| Ethiopia | 04:18 | 3% | 22,339 |
How this works (the honest bit).
Around 100,000 commercial flights operate on a typical day, and an average flight lasts about two and a half hours, which puts roughly 10,000 aircraft in the air at any moment. Carrying an average of about 130 passengers each, that is on the order of one and a third million people airborne right now. Commercial aviation is the one activity on this network that does NOT follow the local clock: red-eye departures, long-haul routes crossing many time zones and aircraft in transit mean the sky is busy at every hour, so we have deliberately not applied a local-time curve here. The number should therefore look steadier than the others on the network, and that is the honest result rather than a bug. Every figure on this page is a model built from population data, each country's local clock and the assumptions above. It is an estimate, it moves every second, and at least one of them is certainly true.
Why does food taste different in the air?
In-flight meals are not simply worse. Your sense of smell is suppressed at altitude, which changes what you can perceive at all.
- Smell is dulled in the dry cabin air. Aroma compounds need to reach the olfactory epithelium at the back of the nose. Dry air and reduced airflow make that harder, so the aroma half of flavour is weakened before you taste anything.
- Low pressure changes how volatiles behave. At reduced cabin pressure, aroma compounds are released differently from food, which alters the profile rather than simply turning the volume down.
- Noise suppresses sweetness and saltiness. Loud background noise, which a cabin certainly is, has been shown in controlled tests to reduce perceived sweetness and saltiness while leaving umami relatively intact.
- So airlines over-season. The combination is why tomato juice is popular in the air and rarely ordered on the ground, and why airline food is seasoned more aggressively than restaurant food.
This is a perceptual effect, not a catering excuse. The same meal genuinely tastes different in the air, and the change is measurable rather than a matter of opinion.
Research on cabin pressure, dryness, noise and taste perception. The noise effect has been demonstrated under controlled conditions.