This archive report was first published on 26 July 2019.
July 24 marked a historic day for air travel, with a record-breaking 225,000 flights taking to the skies. This surpasses the previous highest number of flights tracked by Flightradar24, a real-time air-traffic-tracking service.
According to Ian Petchenik, who manages media and community relations for the company, the figure represents virtually every trackable aircraft in the world that flew on Wednesday between midnight and 11:59 p.m. UTC.
The 225,000 figure includes a wide range of aircraft, from cargo planes and commercial passenger flights to helicopters, private jets, gliders, sight-seeing flights, and personal aircraft.
Flightradar24 tracks flights by combining data from several publicly available sources, including Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) transponder signals from aircraft, multilateration (MLAT) transponder calculation, and radar data. However, the tracking coverage excludes certain sensitive air traffic, including most military flights.
While it's theoretically possible that there have been days with more aircraft before Flightradar24 began tracking flights and recording data in 2006, Petchenik said it seems unlikely since the number of aircraft active around the world has continuously increased.
He also noted that the fact that a higher proportion of aircraft are adopting ADS-B than ever before likely played a role in the record-breaking figure.
Commercial air travel accounts for 2 to 3% of man-made carbon emissions, and some Twitter users criticized increasing air travel as damaging to the environment and contributing to climate change.
