What percentage of US adults have flown on an airplane?
Acclaimed American author Daniel Pink recently asked this interesting question on LinkedIn as a test for one’s skill at estimation.
My heuristic says that the guess should be neither high nor low to avoid any embarrassment. Hence, at first glance, my answer was 59%.
But an effective approach to answering this question would involve selecting a sample population that perfectly represents the intricacies, diversities, and distribution of the total population, and surveying them to find the proportion of those who flew at least once among this sample. Then this proportion can be extrapolated for the population of the entire country by accounting for the assumptions and the limitations of this study.
Another approach we could take is to find an answer for a close but different question – what percentage of US adults can afford the average fare of an American domestic airline? This is one of the fastest ways to arrive at a guess.
Before we take a look at how this can be done, let us take a glance at the limitations and assumptions.
LIMITATIONS:
i) Some people could easily afford the fare, but never flew on an airplane because of the factors like aerophobia or travel bans. But this proportion could be countered to an extent by the population who flew in the past despite their present-day poverty.
ii) Stats used for this approach might themselves be inaccurate estimates.
iii) Thresholds and cut-offs we assume might be arbitrary.
ASSUMPTIONS:?
i) People who flew outside of the US at least once can afford domestic airfare. This assumption makes our task simpler by limiting the case study to domestic travel.
ii) Any person over the age of 15 years could be considered an adult for this case study.
iii) Average domestic airfare in the United States is 400 USD. This assumption is made based on?THIS?article from Business Insider.
A few further assumptions could be made now and then.
Now, let us begin by answering an important question – how many adults are currently residing in the United States?
The total population of the United States is close to 330 million based on the official census.gov website of the US. The age distribution shows that 81.63% of this population are adults (15 years or older). Based on this, we can round off our estimated adult population to 260 million.
This population is spread across around 120 million households as per census.gov. This would mean that on average, a household would contain three members, two of whom are adults.
As per the finance and investment website dqydj.com (dqydj is the abbreviation for ‘don’t quit your daily job’), around 6% of total households have an annual income of less than 10,735 USD in 2021. This would mean that an adult from these households would be spending more than 4% of his/her annual family income on an average domestic airfare. This is a relevant chunk of their annual earnings and hence, they might be reluctant to spend such an amount on air travel.
This 6% means 7.2 million households and if we use the average figure of 2 adults per household, this makes for a total of 14.4 million adults.
As per dqydj.com, the 14th percentile of annual household income in the United States is 20,000 USD. It means that there are 8% of households with annual incomes between 10k (6th percentile) to 20k USD. Let us assume that on average, one out of two adults from each of these households did not fly on a domestic airplane yet. Hence, there are 19.2 million adults in these households and 9.6 million of them did not fly on an airplane.
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So until now, our estimate boils down to 14.4 + 9.6 million adults, which is close to 9% of the total adult population of the United States.
It means that close to 90% of the United States adult population can afford a basic ticket on domestic airlines at least once in their lifetimes provided that their household incomes increase consistently with standard inflation rates and despite all the recessions or pandemics or wars (a very optimistic outlook).
But as mentioned earlier in the first assumption, there might be factors like phobias or travel bans that hinder a person from boarding a flight. Let us take a look at the stats behind specific factors of aerophobia (fear of flying) and acrophobia (fear of heights). As per the common phobia stats from blog.nationwide.com, approximately 7.5% and 2.6% of the total population in the United States suffer from acrophobia and aerophobia respectively.
We could add these two percentages and deduct them from the 90% to report a guess of 79.9%, but there are a few considerations we need to account for before doing this:
i) Some people might have both acrophobia and aerophobia, which means that we cannot add both percentages directly.
ii) Some people might have developed these phobias after flying for the first time, which means they have to be included in our final guess. Moreover, a few individuals might be consistently flying to overcome their phobias.
iii) The percentages reported are for the total population, which involves children too.
Hence, these percentages are quite useless for our case study. But we could probably consider an arbitrary range of 4 to 8 percent for all such miscellaneous factors to arrive at a final guess.
Hence, our final guess is now between 82 to 86 percent. The closest option available in Daniel’s poll is 88%.
As per an article from airlines.org, 88 percent of American adults flew on a commercial airline, it cited the Air Travelers in America report conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs.
The United States has an extensive and well-developed air transportation network. As per Wikipedia, there were 86 airports in the United States that handled over 1,000,000 passengers each in the year 2013. As per “Preferred modes of transportation when taking a family vacation in the U.S. 2015” stat published in statista.com, plane ranks second with a 31% of share. Morning Consult’s The State of American Travel 2018 survey cited by an article of yahoo finance states that “Americans are particularly dissatisfied with the cost of air travel.”
Hence, despite being a na?ve strategy, this approach of correlating?the income stats with affordability & subsequently, the proportion of US adults that have flown on airplanes works fairly well.
Click on the italic parts below to redirect to the references:
POPULATION STAT?from census.gov
Households from?FAMILIES & LIVING ARRANGEMENTS?section from census.gov
AGE DISTRIBUTION IN 2020?from statista.com
HOUSEHOLD INCOME PERCENTILES?from dqydj.com
COMMON PHOBIA STATISTICS?from blog.nationwide.com
YAHOO FINANCE ARTICLE?about Morning Consult’s The State of American Travel 2018 survey
WIKIPEDIA PAGE?of Air transportation in the United States