My Long-Haul Flight Routine

"Long flights suck." "I don't think I can be on a plane that long, how do you do it?" After a while, you get use to it. Five hour flights start to feel like three hours. Nine hours starts to feel like five hours and here's how.

A standard flight for me is about seven to nine hours in one sitting. Flying alone most of the time, gets super lonely, but with time, I learned how to overcome loneliness on my long-haul flights.

First things first, when booking my longer flights, I like to take night flights. So, I can work during the day and head to the airport right after. Another benefit of taking night flights is that you aren't losing a day to travel. If you fly at night, there's most likely nothing open for you to do in your destination anyway and you'd arrive early morning, giving you a whole day of exploring.

I ALWAYS make sure I pull out everything I'm going to want or need for the duration of my flight, so I don't have to worry about going into the overhead space later. By the time the plane doors are shut, it's lights out for me.

Depending on which airlines you take (budget or not) and what time you fly, you're most likely to get a meal and two snacks. Within the second hour of the flight, I'm waking up and snacks or a meal is being served. Assuming it takes 45 minutes to eat, there's another hour down. I have yet to fly an airline (that isn't a budget airline) that doesn't have screens for movies, games, and shows on the seat backs. By the time food is being served, I turn on a movie. Being that movies are 100 minutes long on average, that's almost two hours spent watching movies and eating.

At this time, we're going into our fifth hour of flight time. I go the the bathroom and prepare for my night's sleep. Depending on how tired I am or how productive I feel like being, I'm watching another movie, going to sleep, or doing some language learning for about an hour or so. Whatever I wasn't doing earlier, I do next.

Going into the final hours of the fight, you should be receiving breakfast. So I use that time to go back to the bathroom, freshen up, come back to my seat, finish a movie and eat. By the time all of this is over, you're preparing for landing and you realize that your eight hour flight wasn't that bad.