On 26 Oct 2005 13:12:40 -0700, wrote:

John R. Copeland wrote:
"Everett M. Greene" wrote in message ...
Are you certain about that? It sounds high by several orders
of magnitude. Every airplane in the world would have to make
about a hundred flights per day to get to a million flight
plans per day.

Within the U.S., the number of IFR airborne aircraft at any moment
peaks up to between 4000 and 5000 on most days now.
Overnight minimums typically get down to around 1000 at a time.
http://flightaware.com/analysis/graphs/total.rvt
I won't try to extrapolate that to a total daily count, though.

Also keep in mind that MANY flight plans are filed that are never
flown, but the system still has to keep track of.

I know locally there's a company that flies checks each morning.

Really?

I thought all the check flying guys were put out of business by the
new banking regulations requiring images.



In
just one sector at the local center they have 7 or 8 automatically
generated flight plans each morning, going in and out of a set of small
airports. Those flight plans only get activated if the weather is IFR,
otherwise the company pilots fly VFR and the flightplans just timeout.
There's another company that has quit a few of their routes, but has
not cancelled their automatically generating flight plans for those
routes each morning. They're in the same sector mentioned above. The
facility has been after the company to stop the flight plans, but they
haven't done anything about it yet.

That's 10-11 flight plans per morning (never mind the rest of the
day...), in ONE single sector, that are processed by the system but not
included in the daily traffic count. It all adds up pretty quickly.