Staff Writer
On July 6, which also happened to be the day with the highest temperature ever measured on Earth, the number of international commercial flights reached a record high.
FlightRadar24, a live flight tracking service, reports that July 6 was the busiest day of the year with 134,386 commercial flights registered.
The flight tracking company mentioned that they estimate 100 passengers on average for each aircraft, which suggests that there were likely more than 13 million passengers on that specific day.
According to FlightRadar24, 10,000 of the flights on July 6 were private jets.
The organization also displayed almost no commercial flight activity over a number of regions around the globe, including parts of China, Ukraine, and Sudan, all of which are presently suffering intense armed conflict.
In a coincidental event, July 6 also saw the highest temperature the globe has ever seen.
According to information provided by the University of Maine in the United States, the average temperature over the globe on July 6 was 17.23°C (63°F), which was higher than the previous record high of 17.18°C (62.9F) on July 4 and 5.
The previous record-breaking high average temperature was 16.9 C (62.4 F), according to NASA.
The US space agency stated that the Earth’s surface temperatures in 2016 were “the warmest since modern recordkeeping began in 1880.”
Director of the Godard Institute for Space Studies Gavin Schmidt was quoted by NASA as saying, “2016 is remarkably the third record year in a row in this series.” “While we don’t anticipate record-breaking years every year, the long-term warming trend is clear.”
