Estimation question

Estimate the number of flights taking off and landing at Mumbai airport in a day.

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Structured estimation: decomposing an unfamiliar number using known facts rather than guessing a final figure.

State the assumption to confirm: total flights, arrivals plus departures, or just one direction.
Anchor on a known fact: Mumbai is one of India's busiest single runway pair airports, operating roughly 18 to 20 hours a day.
Estimate throughput per hour, assuming roughly one movement every 2 to 3 minutes during peak hours given runway constraints.
Multiply peak hour rate by operating hours, discounting for lower off peak throughput.
Sanity check against a plausible reference range, near 900 to 950 flight movements a day, and reconcile any gap.

Anchors on runway capacity as the real constraint, not a top down guess.
Shows the math explicitly: an assumed movement every 2.5 minutes times an assumed 19 hours gives roughly 450 per direction, doubled for both.
Sanity checks the result against a plausible real world range instead of stopping at the raw calculation.

Guessing a round number with no visible decomposition.
Ignoring runway capacity as the binding constraint for a busy single runway airport.

How would your estimate change if Mumbai had two independent runways?
What would you check first if your estimate came out 5x higher than industry data?