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Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered why airlines are so bad at managing jet lag for passengers. On a long-haul with Virgin Airways from SFO to LHR, instead of telling people to sleep early in the flight and waking them up for food before arriving at Heathrow at 12pm local time. They kept everyone up for hours with food and then let them sleep for about 2 hours before waking people up for arrival at 12pm.

Weird. My general approach is to switch to destination time as soon as I am seated and then act like I am in the destination timezone. Sleep as best I can if it is night at the destination and force myself awake if it is still day time. Seems much easier to synchronize that way.

The LEDs might work well though if they have been designed to do the job.

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Generally because they prioritize ease of operations over helping customers overcome jetlag. In this particular situation I'd guess the ease of operation comes from:

* full customers are easier to deal with than hungry customers

* Doing meal service early avoids the risk that weather turns rough, making a late meal service hard/impossible.

* Crews are fresher earlier in the flight, and so are do a better job and prefer doing meals early.

* Waking customers up is extra work for crews, and may not be wanted by passengers.

Generally your body can only adjust 1 hour per day (varies by direction of travel). So shifting at the start of your travel is a bit late. You probably want to shift gradually a few days before travel if it’s a major shift.

But that argues equally strongly for what the parent suggests in terms of flight meal/sleep timing.

Not really - if anything it argues against. You have no control or information about who did and didn’t start shifting when and people may be connecting from another flight and have different jet lag differentials to begin with. Serving it on the destination time is probably the best, but if someone hasn’t started shifting, they’ll be a hungry and cranky passenger vs you being cranky and tired after you’ve left the plane and you’re not the airline’s problem.

>They kept everyone up for hours with food and then let them sleep for about 2 hours before waking people up for arrival at 12pm.

Weird, must be airline specific? All the intercontinental flights I've taken recently follows a "take-off -> food -> dark -> food -> landing" schedule, regardless of what time it is outside.

I suspect a lot of people expect an airline meal on their long haul flight, so that’s what’s done.

Like you, one can always ignore them - I’ve missed many a dinner and breakfast by sleeping through them on a flight back to Europe.

On SFO to LHR flights I tend to eat in the lounge, down a shot of Dream Water and just sleep until LHR.

Sadly the Virgin arrivals lounge closes by the time you get through immigration and baggage collection, so you'll need to grab a bite to eat, but it's not the end of the world. I can usually average 6-8 hours of decent enough sleep doing that.

I just took this flight and that was not my experience. Food was served in the first 2 hours and the last 2 hours of the 10 hour flight leaving 6 hours of dark for sleep. Unfortunately my toddler did not want to sleep beyond his late nap so I was up for the entirety of it.

Yeah there's no way you're going to fix the jet lag on SFO-LHR or any similar city pair in one day

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