Tips for surviving a long-haul flight

Pic by Lin Pernille Photography

Let’s not mince words: long-haul flights SUCK. And no-one knows this better than Australians. Any time we want to journey from our hallowed homeland to London or New York, we endure 20-plus hours of air travel. That’s two long flights and a lot of shlepping and waiting around in between. Then there are the special events that make the experience all the more memorable: kids who kick the back of your seat, broken entertainment systems on 13-hour flights, being penned in by the world’s most obstinate sleeper…it’s enough to make one want to have a staycation.

I am typing this from a seat next to gate 38 at Los Angeles airport, where I will shortly board that infernal 13-hour flight to Sydney. Instead of summoning dread over what awaits me, I’m going to serve up a bunch of advice and anecdotes that will hopefully make your next long-haul trip a little less painful.

Tips and strategies for staying sane

• Bring your pyjamas. For real. I always bring my trackies — sweatpants to you Americans — and change into them as soon as I’ve checked in. I also wear a fleecy hoodie and thick socks. It always gets cold on the plane, and you don’t want to spend half a day shivering as you gaze at the ice patterns forming on the window. Sometimes I bring a small fleecy blanket, too. I can roll it up and use it as a pillow or wrap it around me to create a comforting cocoon. The blankets provided by the airlines tend to be small, scratchy and not very effective at warming you up.
• Bring your own snacks. When you board a long-haul flight you relinquish a lot of control. At least if you smuggle some snackage you can choose when and what to eat. And man cannot live on airplane food alone.
• Load up your iPod with videos, music that makes you happy and new episodes of your favourite podcasts. Pretty self-explanatory, but the key is to save up a few new installments of tried-and-true podcasts. That way you’ll be looking forward to hearing the latest from people you like. I even chuck a few of my favourite meditation podcasts in the mix just in case I need to calm down during a bout of turbulence.
• Go for light reading material. There’s a reason there’s a genre known as the airport novel. If you’re bringing fiction on-board, you want to go for something with short chapters and probably a lot of chase scenes, explosions or ludicrously improbable chance meetings between former lovers with unresolved issues. This is not the time to finally have a crack at Les Miserables. (Though I do recommend adding the musical’s soundtrack to your iPod. One Day More!)
  
  I always buy three magazines: one vaguely artsy and creatively inspiring, one focused on fitness and healthy lifestyles — so that I can pretend I am fit and healthy — and one complete trashrag featuring fabricated stories about reality TV stars. The latter is for when my attention span is so destroyed by exhaustion that I can barely handle complete sentences.
• Don’t fly United. It may be unfair of me to malign this particular airline and exclude other, perhaps more deserving brands, but I have had so many bad experiences with UA that I feel it is my duty to warn you off them. First off, their planes are really old. Unlike most long-haul carriers, which offer individual TV screens and a vast array of entertainment options, United makes do with single CRT screens mounted above the aisles every twenty rows or so They’ll screen a few movies, which invariably get interrupted by fuzz, wiggly lines and poor sound. Obviously this does not happen “on-demand”.
  
  Technological inadequacies aside, my main beef with United is that they just don’t like to tell you what’s going on. Once I was flying from New York to Sydney, via San Francisco. The departure time had been delayed by an hour, but everyone had been loaded onto the plane and we were buckled up and ready to go. An announcement came over the PA:
  
  “Uh…ladies and gentlemen, you may have noticed that the departure time has passed….uh…unfortunately, during our routine maintenance check, we discovered a fault, and as a result, this flight may be delayed, re-routed or cancelled. My co-pilot is on the phone now trying to work something out, so just sit tight while we figure out what to do.”

  Well, okay, fair enough. Stuff happens. Safety first and all that. But then, ten minutes later, the captain came back on.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome about United flight 863 to San Francisco. We will be taking off in just a few moments.”

  So…did they fix the plane, or would we be flying in faulty aircraft to an unspecified location? Throughout the flight I played a little game in my head. It was called “Will I Still Be Alive In Six Hours?” It alternated between that and another newly invented game, “Where Will I Be In Six Hours?” Obviously I survived, but the turbulence — both emotional and physical — that ensued was far from fun.

• Be mindful of the need for sleep and relaxation. Travel is stressful, and can create weird and unexpected responses in you. A few months ago I was flying from Chicago to New York. I had just had an intense three days of doing 11 back-to-back on-camera interviews, and was totally wiped. The tiredness combined with my ol’ friend anxiety, and when I got to the airport I suddenly became utterly convinced that my plane was going to crash and I was going to die. This thinking was completely irrational, but it felt very, very real. I did not want to get on that flight.
  
  I tried to talk myself down from it, but I was way too wound up. So I opened my laptop and wrote an “Oh by the way, in case I should, like, die or something, I just want you to know that I think you’re amazing” email to someone dear. Then I stood up, boarded the plane, sat down in my window seat and cried at the unfairness of it all. A few minutes later, a man came and sat next to me. He couldn’t tell that I was upset, but he just happened to start a conversation with me about pharmaceuticals and being a sales rep and wonderful, mundane things that I could cling to to help pull me out of the Swamp of Crazy. I felt like he had saved my life, and he didn’t even know it. Thank you, lovely guy whose name I don’t remember.
  
  All of that happened because I was tired and rushed and needed to just chill out. So if you’re feeling weird and unsettled, remember that tiredness plays a big role.

Bonus: Vomit bag anecdotes!

• On yet another flight from New York to Sydney a few years ago, a guy sitting a few rows up from me wrote me a letter on a vomit bag and instructed one of the flight attendants to give it to me. His name was Vince, he was an accountant, and he felt certain we were destined to spend our lives together. Note that he sent me this regurgitatey missive at the beginning of a 13-hour flight, meaning that every time he or I got up to use the bathroom, awkward eye contact ensued.
• My dad told me this great story once about a guy on his flight who became airsick, pressed his attendant call button, and attempted to hand the flight attendant money as he was vomiting into the bag found in his seat pocket. It seems that he saw an advertisement for $9.95 photo processing on the bag and, not being able to read English, assumed it was the fee charged to spewers for sullying the stationery.