Prompted by the record-setting, November 10th Boeing 777 23-Hour / 12,500 Mile, Non-Stop flight from Hong Kong To London and my own 17-Hour NYC=>HK flight the day earlier.
In my humble opinion, the human body just isn’t designed to be cooped up in a coach class seat for a period of hours that exceeds double digits.NYC => Los Angeles: 5 plus hours. Doable, uneventful, and you can bang out a decent book on the flight.
NYC => Hawaii: 11 hours non-stop. Not excruciating. Especially if the excursion’s a second honeymoon.
NYC=>Hong Kong: 17 hours non-stop over the North Pole. When I say long assed, I mean so long your ass literally falls asleep with pins and needles no matter how you contort your body. Now onto the poll Questions:
What’s the longest non-stop flight you’ve endured?
What do you do the pass the time on those flights that feel like a 5-year mission?
Besides more comfortable seats (the subject of many a thread here) and drugs, what could airlines offer to make those intercontinental journeys a little more bearable?
I’ve been on the Chicago-Tokyo flight many times. I can’t remember the flight time exactly - about 14 hours?
Try to sleep, but not try too hard. Make sure I have several books that are entertaining and easy to read.
Give me an aisle seat. Make it clear to me that I won’t miss meals if I fall asleep. Better movies. Movies and TV on demand. Better music and audio program, including NPR, talk shows, etc. Power plug for my laptop, and Internet access through Wi-Fi. Self-service drinks and snacks, mostly as an excuse to get up and walk around. Better pillows.
I take long ass flights almost every month. How about Singapore to Paris to Chicago to Austin. That was around thirty six hours with the layovers.
Singapore Airlines was great, even in the back. 80+ movie and TV channels, all on-demand. Reasonable amount of room for my fat ass and long legs. Food that didn’t totally suck.
Tips for long flights
Take your own pillow. One of those horseshoe shaped ones. And eye shades.
Drink lots and lots of water.
Wear comfortable, loose fitting clothes. It’s not a fashion show.
Get up and stretch your legs at every opportunity.
London - Singapore, about 12 hours. I’ve also flown London - New Zealand, which is 12 hours followed by 10.5 hours. IMO, over 9 hours is too long. Oh, and if you spend longer in the airports than you do on the flight, that’s too short.
I absolutely cannot sleep on a plane, so much that it’s now probably more of a psychological issue. What I actually find passes the time best is programming on an old Psion palmtop computer. It holds my concentration in a way books don’t. I’ve had 11 hour flights vanish doing that.
Not placing the TV handset container so that it cuts a further inch or so off valuable leg space. (Royal Brunei, I’m looking at you.) Broadband could possibly make flying enjoyable - 12 hours to screw around on the internet while snacks and meals are served to me? Yes please!
SFO to Taipei (then onto Bangkok, after an hour layover) - not sure how many hours, but long nonetheless. It was on United, not so comfortable, but they fed us at least 4 times and showed us 3 movies (this was circa 1995, YMMV). I think loading up with some comfort carbs helped with the sleep cycle, and they gave us lots of Asian noodle dishes and snacks.
Melbourne to LAX (brief stop in Auckland) - On Air New Zealand, which is my favorite carrier. Great food, we had the bulkhead seats and I actually got down on the floor and curled up for awhile. I’m sure you can’t do that now (and I don’t curl with my artificial hip), but it was really an OK flight.
Check out the article in Conde Nast Traveler (sometime in the last few issues) about first class from JFK to Dubai on Air Emirates. Read it and drool!
I want to say it was San Fransisco to Tokyo, about 17 hours (or at least, it FELT like it when I was 8!) Back then, I passed the time by asking my dad how much longer we had (every 30 seconds), or running up and down the aisle like a squirrel on crack.
Haven’t been on a flight nearly that long in a while, but normally I tend to bring a book or two to read, maybe a Game Boy with a few games (Tetris, Dr. Mario, and a Pokemon game, and you’re set!)
As for making the flight more bearable, I think a plane set up for LAN parties in the air could be amusing. Imagine playing Counterstrike or Day of Defeat on a server with 200 of your best friends, all while shouting taunts up and down the length of the plane while stewardesses brought you Bawls and cheetos.
Someplace in Minnesotta that I can’t spell to Seoul, Korea and/or San Franciso to Beijing. I don’t know the exact elapsed time.
On the flight to Seoul, I was still abusing pain pills and tranqs; that made the time shorter. Plus, I was in business class; the seats were pretty comfortable.
On the Beijing flight, I read a lot and slept a lot.
Is it just me, or didn’t they fly in the wrong direction on this 23 hour HK —> London flight? As in, they purposely wanted to fly longer just for the sake of it?
Wont about 18-19 hours get you pretty much anywhere? If i wanted to fly exactly half way across the world, how long would that take?
Back in 1975 I flew LAX to Bangkok on some very cheap charter flight. It turned out the the planes were being used to fly the Vietnamese refuges over to the USA from Bangkok. Anyway the regular seats were all removed and some much smaller seats were installed that could easily accommodate the average Vietnamese, but they in no way could accommodate the average American backpackers who were traveling the other way!
Man, were our asses sour by the time we arrived! But Bangkok was great. All the American GI’s had gone, but the Atlanta Hotel was still full of girls.
When I flew to Europe (only about 7 hours), I think it was on a 777. What was nice is that they have a kind of in-seat home entertainment system. You can basically pick whatever movies or CDs you want to listen to.
The military is king when it comes to long flights.
I had to get to my brother’s wedding in Pittsburgh, and I was stationed in Sicily. Getting to Pittsburgh was simple - space available on a military charter. Sicily to Naples to Rota, Spain to the Azores, taking on fuel and more passengers each time.
Next stop was Philadelphia, where I hopped a Greyhound bus. I got to Pittsburgh in just over a day.
Getting back was harder. I hopped another bus back to Philadelphia, only to find there were no spaces available to get to Europe at all. So I hopped another flight going to Norfolk, and waited overnight there, staying in the barracks. The next day they had a KC-10 refuelling plane heading back to Rota, and I got a seat on it.
I spent another night in Rota before a seat opened up on a C-5 going to Sicily. I hit base with two days left on my leave chit.
I usually rely on four modes of entertainment; the movie, my MP3 player, my laptop, and a book. It’s all about breaking it up; listen to some songs, watch the shit movie, then read, then more songs, play some video games, etc. Makes it go faster.
I do the 5-hour Toronto-California flight a lot, and I fly SOMEWHERE every week, so I do have practice.
I flew from Hong Kong to LAX to NY to Sao Paolo once.
So yeah, about two days without a bed. I was flying economy, too.
I’ll echo what RickJay said - find a bunch of things to occupy yourself with and alternate. I’m one of those lucky guys who can sleep on a plane, though I usually prefer to deprive myself of sleep the previous night so as to be able to nap more comfortably on the flight. Sometimes I bring a little book of poetry to memorize, and/or to use for handwriting practice (calligraphy or boustrophedon). Great fun, if you don’t mind looking a little silly to your fellow passengers.
I was on an LAX to Sydney flight, sitting in an exit row seat of 747. The exit doors have a large aluminum (actually, since it was Qantas, it was aluminium) handle on them. About eight hours in, boy was I tempted to pull the handle just to escape.
On the return flight, I had a row of three seats across all to myself. After we were up, I told the steward that if he would give me a glass with about thee fingers of scotch in it, I would curl up and not bother him for the rest of the flight. He woke me up as we were about to descend.
Also, my advice, for those who tend to get constipated after flights like that as all that compression is just loverly for the intestines:
Do a fiber treatment at least two days out or some kind of laxative/suppository to clean out yourself. This will also help with the dreaded farts that plague every flyer. The Fart of the Apocalypse at 20,000 feet is never fun for anyone. It will also make it easier to fly knowing you won’t have to stand in the line for the lavatory squeezing your cheeks togehter when there are 15 people before you.
Also, if you are a germ-o-phobe like me you will bring your own pillow or neck pillow so your face does not come anywhere near the airline pillows (that are not always cleaned between flights. And I won’t even go into the disgustingness of the blankets either.) Take a sweater/sweatshirt/light jacket that you can use as a blanket or pillow. If you get a chance at the middle section to lay down on a set of 5, put down a freaking jacket where your face will be near. See the Fart of the Apocalype note above!!!1111!!!
Ear plugs are critical in the event you get some jabbering lunatic next to you. A book/magazine too. Earplanes are pilot invented. ( I think this is the brand.)
I also highly recommend sinofresh and, if you are not squeamish: sinus rinse to use in the lavatory. I love both these products as until I discovered the first one, always always always x25 got sick from whatever the lone hacking contagious sicko that is required on every plane that flies as per the Pharmaceutical Industry Agreement in conjuction with the FAA’s manifest of We Hate The People Who Give Us Our Jobs. The first time I used sinofresh and my own cheapie and smaller version of Sinus Rinse (wasn’t on the market yet) I didn’t get sick at all!) Remember kiddies, the airlines hates you. Hates you ALOT and they recycle the air on the plane.