SAS is touting its new 11:50 p.m. nonstop from Newark to Copenhagen as the “Scandinavian cure against jet lag.” Although 1997 is barely half over, that has to be a strong contender for the year’s dumbest promotion. A late-evening departure (with a mid-afternoon arrival the next day) may appeal to quite a few travelers, but a cure for jet lag it’s not. By my lights, it makes jet lag worse.
Jet lag really doesn’t have anything to do with the process of flying–in a jet or otherwise. Instead, as I understand it, jet lag is a less-than-ideal name for the physical problems caused when a human body is forced into a significant change in its sleep-wake time schedule. Most of the year, continental Western Europe is six hours ahead of U.S. Eastern time and nine hours ahead of Pacific time (the UK is five and eight hours ahead, respectively).
That means an American traveling to Europe must suddenly adjust to a sleep-wake cycle that is 5 to 9 hours off the usual pattern–an adjustment that can take several days.
When you first arrive in Europe and try to go to sleep in Paris or Rome at 11 p.m. local time, your body is still at 2 to 5 p.m., depending on the time zone at home. And when you want to wake up at 7 a.m. local time, your body is still at 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. Jet lag is the result of that time-cycle upheaval.
The travel press is full of medical advice about jet lag–an area I’ll avoid because I’m not a medical expert. From a nonmedical perspective, the best way I know to minimize transatlantic jet lag is to start accommodating to European time several days before you leave home. That means going to bed and getting up earlier and earlier each day. By the time you reach Europe, you have to adjust for only a few hours difference, not the full 5 to 9 hours.
How do flight schedules impact on that process? A huge majority of flights from the United States to Europe operate overnight. Obviously, to minimize jet lag, you should opt for an early-evening U.S. departure, forget the meals and movies, and try to sleep immediately. That way, you can maintain your progressive adjustment to European time.
The new SAS flight does just the opposite. On a departure at 11:50 p.m., you’d be lucky to doze off by, say, 12:30 a.m. Instead of going to sleep at an appropriate bedtime in Europe, you’d be trying to go to sleep when it’s 6:30 a.m. wakeup time in Europe.
Over my many trips to Europe, I’ve suffered least from jet lag on the three occasions when I flew during the day. That way I didn’t have to try to sleep on the plane at all–difficult enough in Business or First Class, virtually impossible in cattle-car Economy. Coupling day travel with pretrip time adjustment worked better than any other approach I’ve tried.
The only daytime nonstop flights to Europe I could find in the current Official Airline Guide go to London: from Boston on American and British Airways, and from New York-Newark on American, British Airways, Continental and United. Nothing to Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Frankfurt or Paris (except for Air France’s hyper-expensive Concorde); nothing from Chicago or Washington.
SAS has the right idea in trying to help travelers minimize jet lag. But SAS’s remedy–a late-evening departure–makes the jet lag worse, not better.
