Travel hacks for a long-haul flight, from seats to socks to sleep, plus how to entertain yourself on that 13-hour journey

Force yourself to sleep, but not for too long, bring your own entertainment, and your own ear buds or earphones – experts offer tips for making trips tolerable

Don’t self-medicate, with pills or alcohol, and don’t imagine a flight is the chance to wade through that heavy book you’ve always meant to finish reading

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If you’re going to fly 13 hours or more on an airliner, there are several factors that affect the comfort of your journey – the seat you choose, the clothes you wear, whether you drink alcohol, how much you sleep, and how you keep yourself entertained. Photo: Alamy

Published: 5:00am, 12 Nov 2019Updated: 5:38pm, 13 Nov 2019

I was going to fly to New Zealand and I was dreading it. Not the destination – it’s a place I’ve always wanted to go – but the 13-plus hours of non-stop flight, claustrophobic and inert, required to get there. I already have trouble tolerating seven- to eight-hour transatlantic flights. How would I assuage an apprehensive mind and a contorted body imprisoned in an aerodynamic fuselage hurtling high above the Pacific Ocean for what surely would feel like an eternity?

Of course, my San Francisco-to-Auckland flight is hardly the longest non-stop in service; that honour, at almost 19 hours, belongs to the Singapore-to-Newark route via Singapore Airlines. And an even lengthier flight – more than 19 hours – was recently tested by Qantas Airlines to connect Sydney and New York.

Lighter, more fuel-efficient, technologically improved aircraft make such flights possible, but the human passengers remain physiologically the same. For tips on preparing for the experience, I reached out to experts and to long-haul frequent fliers – and learned that I may worry too much. Many of my queries were generally answered with responses that would be applicable to any but the shortest, commuter-hop flights.

But there was some information that was new to me – that you shouldn’t sleep more than three hours on a flight, for example – and some unusual travel hacks.

Try to get an aisle seat or exit row seat. Photo: Alamy

According to TripAdvisor’s vice-president for flights, Daniel Gellert: “The best thing a flier can do to prepare for a long-haul flight is to give themselves the best seat possible.”