19 Interesting Facts about Air Travel. Once You Get To Know Them, Nothing Is Going to Stop You from Exploring the World!

Travelling by plane has become so easy that no wonder so many of us choose it to get around the world, sometimes covering very long distances. Still, airports and planes have got so many secrets. Today we will reveal some of them.

Flight numbers carry some meaning. The combination of letters is a unique code of a particular airline, given by IATA (International Air Transport Association). For example AA is the code of American Airlines and LH is the code of Lufthansa.

The letters are followed by a sequence of digits. Usually the flights to the east have got even numbers while those to the west are odd. Moreover, number ‘1’ means that the flight is a priority of the airline (AA1 means flying with American Airlines from New York JFK airport to Los Angeles)

Also, the long-distance flights are marked with two digits while the shorter ones come with three. Four digits mean this is a domestic, chartered, government or cargo flight.

The Kansai airport (Japan) is located on an artificial island. It is connected with an almost 4-kilometer long double bridge. It took 6 years to complete the layer of earth over the sea floor.

The door weighs about 100 kilos. Before the take-off the cabin crew close it really easily. However, once the aircraft in airborne, nobody can really open it. First of all because of the pressure difference between the cabin and the outside, which works like an extra lock.

The San Francisco airport employs an extraordinary team of therapists. It includes 22 dogs and a pig called Lilou. The animals have been trained to comfort people and relieve their stress. You can play with them and watch them make their tricks. Everything in order to make passengers forget about a delayed flight or missing luggage.

Plane tires are filled with nitrogen. They are often called 'radial tires'. Nitrogen is a non-flammable gas and it is not affected by temperature differences.

The tires are replaced every half a year or after each 150-200 landings.

Flying from Genoa you can make one exception to the 100 ml hand luggage rule. The rule does not apply to the local specialty called pesto, as passengers can carry up to 500 ml per head of the product in their hand luggage.

Sky today is nothing but a huge highway. Every day there are about 27,000 planes flying over Europe. In case of USA this number goes up to 50,000! The air traffic control in Great Britain handles 6,000 planes per day (about 250 every hour)

The video visualizes what the traffic over Europe and the Atlantic Ocean really looks like.

The urinals in the Amsterdam-Schiphol airport are a little bit different. Each of them has got an image of a fly inside.

Gentlemen, driven by their instinct immediately want to kill the insect off and this is what they aim the flow at. As a result, the splashing issue is solved!

The planes travelling up in the sky leave white stripes behind them. These are the so-called condensation streaks, which is nothing but stretched clouds made of ice crystals. They form when the plane reaches the altitude of at least 8 kilometers (5 miles).

The Singapore Changi airport looks like a huge botanical garden. Its main attraction is a 40-meter long waterfall. Nearby there are also a butterfly house, ponds with exotic fish and a garden full of sunflowers, orchids and cactuses. Interestingly, the airport also offer free cinemas.

German Lufthansa orders 10 tones of caviar per year.

Airbus A380 is the biggest passenger plane in the world. Its wings are 80-meter wide and the aircraft is 73 meters long. It can carry 850 passengers.

The oldest airline still operating is the Dutch KLM. Its first flight took place on 17 May 1920. The plane flew from London to Amsterdam.

Only 5% of the world population have flown.

Perhaps the best way to try flying is the connection between the Scottish islands of Westray and Papa Westray. The planes cover the distance of 2.73 kilometers in about 2 minutes!

The lights go out for a reason. In case of emergency, the evacuation lights would guide passengers to safety much more easily.

Before the pandemics broke out, the busiest connection was the one between Seol and the island of Jeju (South Korea). In 2018 there were 250 flight daily, with planes taking off on average every 15 minutes.

Surprisingly it is not the toilet which is the dirtiest place aboard. The unfolding trays in front of you where you put your meals and drinks is the worst spot! In fact there are 8 times more microorganisms there than in the toilet!

Thai airports offer special chairs for Buddhist monks.

Scanners relying on X-ray backscatter were used on American and a few European airports. At the moment they are forbidden, but you might come across some in Russia.

Which fact did you find the most surprising?