For those outside of aviation, the sky can feel like a wide expanse in which one has endless space to move, maneuver or even do tricks.
The reality is actually that the altitude at which planes fly is a fairly narrow space through which thousands of planes move at any given time — data from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) shows that at peak hours there are over 5,400 planes over 5 million square miles of U.S. airspace. Prior to the summer of 2023, the FAA prepared for the busy travel period by reworking certain routes to fly higher than usual to "redistribute volume across all available airspace."
Related: Many Airlines Will Be Flying Higher to Avoid In-Air Traffic
To demonstrate just how close planes can get to each other on an average day, the pilot behind TikTok's @flyhigh738 account filmed a video from the cockpit showing another plane cruising past at high speed.
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'Beautiful, isn't it?' pilot says in viral video
"When you travel by plane and think the sky is so big that you're alone up there but you're actually almost always flying so, so close to other planes..." the pilot of a commercial airline who posts videos from inside the plane to the anonymous account, says in the video.
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She specifies that the visible plane is approximately 1,000 feet or 300 meters from hers — this is the minimum vertical limit that planes must maintain from each other but, according to the pilot in the TikTok, are a very common occurrence in a crowded airspace.
"As we're most of the time following standard airways [which are a] kind of motorways in the sky, we're only distant 1,000 feet or 300 meters from each other," the pilot says. "Beautiful, isn't it?"
Pilots often turn to TikTok to dispel common myths about aviation
The video clearly resonated with travelers who might not have realized or visualized just how close planes can really get to each other — it was viewed over a million times and received nearly 48,000 upvotes.
"Been flying all of my life but the older I get, the more unnatural I think it is to fly through the air at 35,000 [feet] in a tube," one commenter named Tyler wrote. "Weird, I know."
With the rise of TikTok, there has also been an explosion of pilots who dispel common flying fears and explain different aspects of aviation in layperson terms. Earlier this year, commercial pilot Kyle (many of them often keep their last name private in order to not associate their content with their employer) started posting short TikTok videos explaining common travel fears.
After seeing a few take off, Kyle launched a "Dial A Pilot" program in which those with flying questions can pay $50 to spend 15 minutes chatting with a pilot. Traveler have been turning to it both to ask technical questions like "what causes turbulence?" and more psychological ones such as "how do I not fear flying?"
The pilots who participate, in turn, use it to supplement their income and feel a closer connection to passengers that is not always possible when one is in the cockpit until the last passenger has left the plane.
