I hit submit too soon.
Bring your own snack and water bottle. If the food looks dodgy, you can survive on some peanut butter crackers or a box of triscuits ( fiber!!!*) and make your seatmate quite jealous.
- I take my poo’s very seriously.
My brother and his friend flew to Australia several years ago. The flight went from LAX to Hawaii and then, after what was apparently a very short layover, nonstop to Australia. Total time in the air: 22 hours. As an added bonus, the second leg of the flight featured a small child who screamed and cried all the way to Oz.
I flew from Australia to Canada a few years ago. 22 hours. Erk.
Tips? Drink lots of water, sleep as much as you can, and walk around when not sleeping. Also, the cabin vibrates. Putting your feet up on your seat will make them feel better.
I think the only international airport in Minnesotta is Minneappolis/St. Pauul. 
Me, I have no truly great solution. I resort to Dramamine (drowsy formula, PLEASE) and crossword puzzles. The puzzles usually don’t get done because I’m hanging limp from my shoulder harness like a sack of potatoes. On Fuck You Airlines, it’s the only way to fly.
Lot’s of water??
Shit. I start dehydrating myself 3 days before I fly so I won’t have to get up to use the restroom.
Here’s the thing: all of you are attacking the boredom. You gotta go with the flow, go into dumb mode.
Our vet once told us, “you have a border collie. He’s smart. He gets bored when you leave so he wrecks stuff. Consider the bulldog; he’s so dumb that you leave for 8 hours and when you’re coming back through the door, he just realizes that you left.”
You need to be like the bulldog.
Sure, I bring a couple diversions along, but they’re typically things in which I don’t notice the passing of time, e.g. a difficult crossword puzzle.
You’re lucky. My brother got stranded in Puerto Rico when the flight that was supposed to take him back to the mainland was cancelled. He had to call our mom to ask her to pay for a ticket from San Juan to Miami, and AFAIK, his unit never reimbursed her for the cost of that ticket.
Robin
My longest flight was from Johannesburg (South Africa) to Atlanta. Eighteen hours. (It was also eighteen hours from Atlanta to Capetown three weeks earlier, but going that direction I only had the one flight. Coming back the 18 hour leg was the middle leg of my journey. Starting with a short hop in a 6 seater Cessna, then an hour and a half on a smallish, pudgy plane, then the international over ocean flight (with landing off the coast of Africa to refuel) and then two more legs to deposit Grandma (my companion) with her oldest son and the get me back to my parents. And to make it even better, I’d gotten my period just a day or two before. Nothing like wondering when it will be convenient to get at my tampon supply again. (Tampon supply located in overhead compartment to increase legroom. When we stopped to refuel, we had to claim our baggage from teh overhead compartments, and I removed at least one tampon from my bag and put it in my pocket at that time).
You dehydrate yourself Trunk? :eek: :eek:
I drink lots of water.
Stay awake until it’s dark at the other end if the trip involves a time change of more than 6 hours.
Avoid aerated drinks.
Walk around and stretch, particularly calves. Avoid anything that might cause muscle strains in the couple of days prior to flying.
Try to piss before the cart gets going.
I’ve done more than 20 Australia-Europe flights. The last was with a(n admittedly very cooperative) 7-month-old girl. The longest leg I’ve done was Melbourne-LA (then on to Montreal). IIRC, 14 hours off the floor.
Another idea - bring a laptop w/ DVD player, extra batteries and something like the entire Lord of the Rings Trillogy Super Extended Directors Cut Edition.
Ambien.
People often forget the length of north-south flights. My longest in a civil passenger plane was from NYC to Rio, via Manus and Panama. It took about three months IIRC. Gruesome.
I never watch movies on a plane. I put the little screen thing on the automap and put the remote back in place. Then I change my watch to destination time. Then I go to sleep or stay awake depending on the destination time.
I have a little reading light so I can reread a novel or two. When that gets old, I pull out the PDA to read some text files and try to memorize some poetry. When it is time to sleep, I put pillows under my elbow (the armrests are too low!) and lean against the wall.
How to make it better? A Pepsi machine would be nice. Someplace to go to for a reason. Why have crew come around to give you a lousy half-can of Pepsi? A machine would be nicer and cheaper.
- What’s the longest non-stop flight you’ve endured?
4 times I’ve flown from NYC or Detroit to Delhi, with a 2-hour stopover in Europe somewhere (depends on the airline). I think it’s 8 to Europe, and then 10 on from there.
- What do you do the pass the time on those flights that feel like a 5-year mission?
Read lots of books. Bring a walkman. Try not to go CRAZY!
- 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?
Make the planes get there faster. Seriouusly, it’s so miserable being in coach. Why does everyone have to bring their screaming babies? GAH!
LAX-Seoul. But my longest day of flying is as follows: Wake up at 4:30 in Siam Reap to watch the sun rise over Angkor Wat. Do other touristy stuff the rest of the day. 5:30 pm flight to Bangkok (1.5 hours). Layover in Bangkok for about 5 hours. 1 am flight to Seoul (6 hours). 7 hour layover in Seoul. 13 hour flight to LAX. Get home at 9:30 in the morning either the next day, or the previous day, or 3 weeks ago, or something like that.
I try to sleep as much as possible. Beside that, listening to music is the best thing for me. Reading in such cramped spaces tends to make me uncomfortable and a little queasy.
No drugs? Damn. How about attractive, intelligent, and single seat neighbors?
Seriously, I have no idea. Long flights are always going to be hell, unless we do the suspended animation thing like in 2001.
NY to Tel Aviv and NY to Nairobi, with a mad dash in London to make my connection. It’s about 6 hours to London, and, if memory serves, another 10 or 12 to Nairobi.
The Tel Aviv flight was cake. I was 13, had a brand new Game Gear, ten pounds of batteries, and Crystal Warriors. I barely noticed when we landed.
The return leg from Nairobi was not so much fun. The flight attendant who serviced us was a rodentine little man with a bad attitude. The walkman batteries were dead, all of my books were read, and my younger brother was cranky.
My solution for long flights? Drugs and immersive RPGs.
I’ve made several long assed trips from the centre of Canada to SE Asia, various destinations, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, KL, Denpassar, Jakarta.
‘Dress comfy’ is very good advice, I take comfy clothes for the plane ride, change once the plane’s in the air, change back just before landing at destination. You look fresh for your arrival and less dishevelled for customs.
Drink fluids every single time they are offered, there is a reason they keep offering.
Get up and walk around, is also sage advice but hardly news.
I usually take my old gameboy, 'cause a gameboy (Tetras) just sucks up time. I find it an excellent distraction when flights get cancelled or delayed. I find magazines better than books. I’m too excited to focus on a book, myself.
A great carrier really helps, I highly recommend Thai Airways and Singapore Air for long inter Asian jaunts. But if you’re headed to Asia from North America I cannot recommend highly enough that you connect to the Japan Air Lines, Chicago to Tokyo flight.
It’s brilliant and you can connect in Tokyo to any other Asian destination with ease. It’s got a couple of great things going for it; firstly, it’s direct - no refuelling stops. This is actually a timesaver over a flight connecting on, say, the west coast, believe it or not.
And secondly, and much more importantly, JAL will put you up, on their dime, including meals, overnight at the Nikko Narita, a fine hotel at the airport. They will even issue your boarding passes for your connecting flights the next morning right in the lobby of the hotel.
That nights sleep, in a comfy bed, means you arrive in Bangkok, Singapore, Jakarta, in a much, much more human state. You’ll still have some jetlag, but it will pass quicker and you’ll actually gain a day that you would have just lay about feeling like crap while your body’s time clock readjusted.
Longest flight, Toronto - Amsterdam (10 hrs on the ground, :smack: ), Amsterdam - Dubai (fogged in, proceed to Muscat, 3 hrs on the ground), Muscat - Bangkok (4 hrs on the ground), Bangkok - Singapore. Yeah, I know, I was young and foolish and exhausted by the time I arrived. I think this routing saved me like $150, or something, it felt like it took a freakin’ week.
I always find the jetlag much worse on the out journey, I’m not sure why.
The longest non-stop I ever took was San Francisco to Hong Kong. 17 hours in the air. Add in the 3 hours or so for Houston to SF and about a one hour layover for the connection and that was a lonnnngggg day.
When I flew Singapore to Houston, I learned quickly to fly JAL from Singapore to Tokyo to Honolulu to Los Angeles. During the layover in Tokyo, they would bus us to the Niko Narita hotel where we could grab a shower, change clothes and catch a nap and/or a meal, then bus us back to the airport. Going the other way, it was an overnight stay at the hotel. And it was all built into the cost of the ticket, which was dirt-cheap and the airline service was outstanding.
The layover in Hono wasn’t all that long, but while they gassed up, we could get off the plane and go into a restricted area of the terminal (we cleared immigration in Hono, but customs didn’t get us until LAX).
Breaking that flight up into segments like that made it almost enjoyable.
Yes. That was a demonstration of the airplane’s range. Boeing just wanted to say “We have an airplane that can go nonstop 3/4 around the earth for no particular practical reason.”
That doesn’t sound healthy. Air in airliner cabins is very dry, and you’re losing a lot more water through evaporation than usual.
I always bring a bottle of water or two, and always specify an aisle seat. So what if I need to use the restroom every couple of hours? I figure it’s a chance to stretch my legs.
About 9 or 10 hours: Toronto - Honolulu. Then, I had a two-hour layover in Honolulu before boarding another 9 or 10 hour flight to Sydney. And I got to do it all over again in reverse a few weeks later.
I read, I watch the movie. I eat and drink when they bring the cart around. Mostly, I’m bored silly, I’m restless, and since I cannot seem to sleep aboard a flight, I’m wide awake. I do not like it when they extinguish all the lights in the cabin “for your sleeping comfort.” I’m sitting there, wide awake in the darkness for hours, and hating it. I’ve had complaints from nearby passengers when I’ve turned on my reading light before, so now I just leave it off.
Give us more room. Give us a “non-sleeping” section, so I can at least kill time by having a conversation, or I have an area where nobody will complain when I flip on my reading light.
Just some ideas, anyway.
It’s been so long since my last looooong airplane trip (Zurich - LAX, in 1978) that at that time it was more usual to stop somewhere on the East Coast if you were flying between Europe and California. I think we stopped in Bangor, Maine, of all places, on that trip.
Back when even coach service was comfortable and gracious, not having to stop might have been an advantage, but as things are now I think I too would prefer to have a brief layover en route and stretch my legs in the terminal.