Guesstimate question - number of airplanes in the sky

Hi there,

I would be happy to share my thoughts on your question:

• First of all, I wonder why you do not like your approach, as it seems fine with me.
• Moreover, please keep in mind that most major strategy consulting firms have not used standalone market size estimations for a long time. While this does not mean it never happens, this type of case study question may not be very meaningful for both the candidate and interviewer, as only a few skills are being tested.
• That being said, simpler market size estimations may still be a part of a case study, for instance when estimating the revenues of the client company is required.

You can find more on this topic here: How to succeed in the final interview round.

If you would like a more detailed discussion on how to best prepare for your upcoming interviews, please don't hesitate to contact me directly.

Best,

Hagen

Hi,

Thanks for your question. 

One approach could be calculate the demand for flight travel per day, how many planes would be required to cater to that demand that will give you # of hours flights taking off in a day - divide the demand by the capacity of an average plane to get the number of planes and then divide by the number of hours of operating time for an airport to get the number of flights that will be in the sky every hour. You can assume equal number of flights will take off as will land at a certain time for simplicity.

The number of flights is determined by the demand for air travel with some buffer for lower utilization rate than 100%.

Thanks,

Sohini

Why are you not convinced by this approach? Seems like a good one to me

That's pretty interesting - you could also factor in differences in flight frequency between domestic (shorter more frequent) & international (longer more infrequent) flights, and % cancellation rates.