Not sure where you're going with the question (and I'm certainly no airline employee), but I'll take a rough stab at the number of elite FFs:

In 2002, UA had 149 billion available seat miles and a load factor of 73.6% for 109 billion occupied seat miles.

Folks over on the UA board argue that there are about 46,000 1Ks, 239,000 1Ps, and 535,000 2Ps. I'll assume each 1K flies 125,000 miles/year, 75,000 for the 1Ps, and 37500 for the 2Ps (i.e. midpoint between the qualifying points for each level, and 25,000 over for the 1Ks).

That comes to 44 billion miles flown by elites, or 41% of occupied seat-miles taken by elites.

It's probably quite a bit less than that for the % of seats on all flights occupied by elites because of elites tending to be on generally longer flights, minimum of 500 qualifying miles per flight, award travel, other things I didn't consider, etc. (on the other hand, many FFs aren't elite because they don't bother to sign up, fly on different airlines, etc.) But it's a decent rough guess and probably a good upper bound.

Sources:

http://www.unitedairlines.co.jp/jsp/...2003/jan01.jsp

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum50/HTML/020998.html

[This message has been edited by studentff (edited 10-21-2003).]