[rob74]

History, as recorded by Flightradar24: "a whopping grand total of 153,359 commercial flights were tracked between 00:00 UTC and 23:59 UTC on July 23, 2026" So I would say it's justified to qualify it. Not sure how Flightradar24's coverage has evolved over time, but it could theoretically be that there were more flights at some point before 2020, but some of them weren't tracked?

[bluefirebrand]

I think the parents point was that before recorded history we can be pretty sure there weren't airplanes for anyone to take flights on

[epolanski]

Minor commercial flights at minor airports? The kind of 20 people flight between two cities in Indonesia not even Indonesians know much?

[FireBeyond]

One would generally think that even those had ADS-B running.

[rob74]

Sure, most commercial aircraft were probably broadcasting their position etc. via ADS-B, the question was just if they were picked up by a Flightradar24 receiver. Also, I'm not sure what the threshold is for Flightradar24 to consider a flight "tracked" - probably at least the takeoff and landing? So (to use the same example) if there was a receiver near the larger city in Indonesia where the flight originated, but not near the remote airstrip where it landed, it probably isn't considered tracked?