The man in the Elevator

A man lives on the tenth floor of a building. Every day he takes the elevator to go down to
the ground floor to go to work or to go shopping. When he returns he takes the elevator to the
seventh floor and walks up the stairs to reach his apartment on the tenth floor. He hates
walking so why does he do it?

Answer

The man is too short to reach the number 10 button.

An alternative solution: The elevator only runs to the 7th floor. The riddle did not state that he takes
the elevator from the 10th floor in the morning, just that he takes the elevator to the ground floor. He
walks to the 7th floor each morning to take the elevator to the ground floor also.
Another alternative solution: The man does it because he needs to go to work to get money and then go
shopping to get food to eat.

How many golf balls are in the air right now world-wide?
A quick Google uncovers that there are 60 million golfers in the world, where "golfer" is
defined by someone who plays more than a round of golf per year. [1]

I couldn't find data on how many rounds that is, so let's assume each golfer played an
average of four rounds per year: that would give you 240 million rounds of golf per year
worldwide.

Let's check if we are at the right order of magnitude with another approach: a Google
search uncovers that there are 35,000 golf courses in the world [2]. If each course is 25%
utilized, open 180 days a year, open 10 hours per days, and can fit 20 golfers per hour,
that gets you 315 million rounds total.

We seem to be roughly right. Let's split the difference and say there are 280 milion
rounds played per year.

Another Google search uncovers that the average amateur golf score is 100 [3]. Personal
experience supports that this is perhaps even generous plus excludes a massive amount
of cheating, but we'll go with it.

That gets you 280 million rounds * 100 strokes = 28 billion golf strokes per year. Let's
roughly double that to accommodate the time spent hacking at the driving range and
putting greens. Let's call it 50 billion golf strokes per year across all forms of golf. We
shall exclude mini golf since the ball rarely leaves the ground if you are doing it right.
Let's assume your average 100-stroke golfer takes an average of 3 putts per hole and
practices putting and driving equally. That means about half of our 50 billion strokes
leave the ground, so call that 25 billion "in the air" shots.

And let's assume that, between short chips, long drives, and shanks, the average ball is in
the air for 3 seconds. That gets you 25 billion x 3 = 75 billion seconds of golf ball
"airtime" per year.

To simplify, assume our golf games and practices are spaced out evenly over the 24
hours in the day and 365 days in the year. This problem would get hopelessly complex if
we tried to factor in what time it is in Palm Springs or what the weather is like in Scotland
right now.

A year has 31.5 million seconds. If you divide our 75 billion seconds of ball airtime over
the 31.5 millions seconds in the year, you get an average of 2,378 balls in the air during
any given second.

How many airplanes are in the air at any given time in the
US?

There are several ways of solving this. There is the demand-side approach where you
back in to the number of planes based on how many people are likely to be traveling,
and there's the supply-side approach where you look at how many planes could the
infrastructure support.

I'll take a supply side approach in solving this and will list out a set of variables below:

Note that I am only taking an intra-US perspective when calculating this, but the general
idea is sufficiently adequate.

Number of states in the US = 50 (rounded)

Average number of major cities per state = 10
Average number of airports in each city = 1
Total number of airports in the US = 50 * 10 * 1 = 500 airports

For an airport to operate, it must have reasonable traffic. Let's assume that on overage
airports operate for 20 hours/day and that each hour 10 planes arrive at an airport. Note
that we only need to consider number of departures OR number of arrivals. This is
because a plane departing from city x has to arrive at city y.
Amount of traffic contributed per airport per day = 20 * 10 = 200 planes (rounding)

We now need to take into account how long is each flight going to take when it is in the
US airspace. For that let's first assume the average duration of a flight when flying from
one part of the US to another to be 5 hours. That might be an overestimation, but its a
starting point.

Total number of airplane hours contributed per airport per day = 5 * 200 = 1000 plane
hours / airport / day

Total number of plane hours / day = 500 * 1000 = 500000

Total number of plane hours / hour = 50000 / 25 = 20000 planes

Note that I didn't take into account small planes, international traffic, military planes, etc.

We know that 2000 is likely to be an underestimate, and based on the napkin math I
think that the answer of about 5,000 planes being in the air at any time makes sense.

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