Get Active in Our Amazing Community of Over 451,000 Peers!
How many airports are there in the world?
Overview of answers
This is a good top down one :) First clarify if they mean major airports or even smaller regional ones, but I assume they mean all airports
Think about breaking this down by continent/country. By each major region, estimate # cities with major airports (i.e. US ~80, Western Europe ~50). Once done, think of a pretty large multiplier (20x) for medium sized airports, and then an even larger multiplier for local airports (100x).
Start with the types of airports. Civil vs. military. Then civil taking into account population, flights per year (as a function of wealth of the population), capacity of given airports (large, medium, small). Large airports = 4 runways, medium airports = 2 runways, small = 1.
Military would be something like the number of countries with airforces, how many planes per.
Hello,
You can use a top down approach as suggested by other experts, but then you could do a quick sanity check of your result using a bottom up approach.
You can start from a region that you know and calculate the ratio Airport/population. Then you can scale this number to the world population making some assumptions (e.g. I wouldn't use the same ratio for African countries).
Best,
Luca
Related Cases
