And suddenly the comment section is full of professional aviators.
If anything, I would think we are more passionate about our hobbies, since it allows us to get away from thinking about work all the time!
- get a sample the size of HN’s readership,
- apply the odds of each person having a license,
- bias slightly because of the audience’s demographics (which skews wealthy and technical),
- then consider that pilots are more attracted to aircraft-related stories,
and suddenly it’s not surprising to have dozens of qualified people in a thread like this.
But yeah, there's a lot of pilots.
In Europe and UK, an ATP is only required for those flying as pilot-in-command (i.e., captain) of a multi-pilot airplane for air transport purposes.
In the US after a crash in 2009, ATP or R-ATP is required for all scheduled air transport flights, but that is not all commercial flights. Ironically, that crash was flown by two ATP holders and so this requirement change would not have helped.
In both cases, a CPL is a prerequisite for the ATP (ignoring military hacks and some MPL stuff).