Passenger Demographics
 

Short
Does anyone know where I can find information on the demographics (e.g., ages, fraction of men vs. women) of air passengers in the US? We have a survey of ~2000 people conducted by Mintel, but that's the best we've found.

Long
I conduct research in how to consider body size and shape in design practice. We work a lot with vehicles, medical devices, manufacturing environments, etc. We have done some work with cockpit design, but the passenger space is largely neglected. This is mostly because there aren't a lot of opportunities: the airlines are trying to maximize passengers. Seat width is constrained by the number of seats, aisle width, and plane geometry. Seat pitch is constrained by seat and plane geometry.

Nevertheless, I think we can quantify how bad things are in useful ways. I have lots of data on the body size and shape of civilian populations. If we can make some good estimates on the demographics (or range in demographics) for flights, we can simulate plane loads of people. With these models we can answer questions like: For a given plane, what is the average level of "accommodation" (e.g., what percentage of passengers will be able to both 1) fit in their space and 2) not have it encroached upon by neighbors)?

To do this, we need data on passenger demography. We found data from Mintel--a survey of ~2000 people that details how frequently their age, gender, how frequently they fly, etc. This is, however, a relatively small sample. And it doesn't specifically answer the question of gender and age distributions on flights. Of course this varies by flight (flights to Orlando vs. Boston), day of the week, time of day, etc., but we'll take whatever we can get. Does anyone have suggestions on where we can go for more data?

Thanks!

Thread Alert
 

This sounds like a request pertaining to airlines in the United States in general and not specifically Delta Air Lines; so the new home for this discussion is now the Travel Buzz forum.

Regards,

Canarsie
Co-Moderator, Delta Air Lines | SkyMiles forum

It seems, with references to the travails of Hawaiian, that trying to establish such information is fraught with political correctness connotations.

Way out of my league here but my first thought is contacting the people that do the in flight magazine. I am sure they have information about demographics to send to marketing people interested in placing adds.

It seems to me that the demographics "requested" (gender, age, etc.) are not what is needed to design passenger space. You need characteristics like height, weight, butt size, giant hats, and so on.

Have you considered simply hiring data gatherers (of which I have read from time to time), sit them in a gate area with a clipboard, and have them tally random passengers by gender, age (child/young/middle/old), height (tall/other), weight (skinny/normal/fat), butt (tiny/normal/huge), and so on?

Pharoah's suggestion is a good one, but you might be able to get this information easier if an airline or airport would let you review security camera footage (which I assume exists).

Since it's generally possible to observe the entry of persons into the passenger security screening lines, there are data collection points that don't require viewing camera footage.

But given the passenger size demographics actually vary tremendously in the US by regions of some sort or another, and as passenger demographics are not the same at all times of the day/week/year, the utility of the data may be better for the OP's purpose if the data collection were done across multiple airports and at various times of the day/year.

Thanks. Of course you are correct. Please read the "long" version of my post--I have the data on body size and shape; I just need to know in what frequency to use it.

Interesting. I was thinking that maybe I needed to take advantage of some long layovers and count people as they board planes. That would give me data on specific flights / planes / etc. But broadly speaking this is even better since I could get a lot more data in a shorter time. And you are correct: there are regional differences, so sampling across multiple locations is a good idea. Thanks, all!

IATA do something similar, an annual air passenger survey. It's still not enormous, only c 7,000 pax, and it's global so may not be very helpful for US-specific queries, but the outputs live here

Great suggestion. Thanks!