Heading East in a Hurry

"Jet lag is more than just an inconvenience. It's pretty devastating physiologically."
"If you're a constant traveller, you'll probably put on more weight, you'll probably have cardiovascular challenges and you may have some behavioural changes."
Carrie Partch, biochemist associate professor, University of California Santa Cruz

"We know ultra long-haul flights pose some extra challenges but that's been true every time technology has allowed us to fly farther."
"The research we're doing should give us better strategies for improving comfort and well-being along the way."
"After 19 hours on this flight, I think we've gotten this right. It feels like we've been on a flight a lot shorter than that."
Alan Joyce, Qantas chief executive

Crew celebrating after the 19-hour flight Credit: AFP

The International Air Transport Association has forecast that before the end of 2019, 4.6 billion people will have taken flight to somewhere from somewhere, on some airline. They also anticipate that by 2037 that number will almost double to 8.2 billion, the staggering impact on the environment notwithstanding. Among those who take long-distance flights and many do, there is the issue of jet-lag. In fact, therapies to counteract jet-lag are in growing demand by an estimated 6 percent annually making that particular industry worth by 2023, $732 million.

According to Global-Data, over 80 drugs meant to ameliorate the problem of disturbed sleep are currently in clinical development, to add to those already on the market. What's jet-lag? You know it when you feel it, after crossing three time zones fairly quickly flying through the air at jet-speed, the result being the body's internal clock is still set to its home timetable. It's that feeling of exhaustion when you arrive at your destination followed by insomnia later that night. That's jet-lag.

And if you're a constant traveller, your body becomes truly confused and you feel like death warmed over.

Travelling eastward reverses the familiar normalcy of the body's day-and-night cycle, so the outcome of west to east is more pronounced than the opposite. Sound complicated? It's more complex than  you may know, given that each of the billions of cells in the human body has its particular clock. Think heart function, food absorption, metabolism, all those organs disrupted.

Passengers exercising on board Credit: Getty

Scientists won a Nobel Prize in 2017 for their discovery that molecular mechanisms control circadian rhythms. The hope that a laboratory rodent can respond to medication to speed its internal clock adjustment, does not, unfortunately, translate to the formulation of a fast-acting pill that frequent flyers can use to help get over that notorious jet-lag. There are certain remedies such as exercise and whole food (not the usual in-flight fare) to help synchronize the body's adjustment to a new time zone.

A University of Boulder Colorado study in 2017 indicated that body-clock adjustment can be rapidly reached through exposure to natural light. Qantas Airways Ltd. this past Friday launched an experimental flight of 19 hours without stop -- the first such lengthy flight to have been attempted, with more to follow -- New York to Sydney, called Project Sunrise.

Qantas is testing a Boeing 787-9  New York to Sydney nonstop.

Source: Qantas

Not only time zones create the misery of feeling jet-lagged; also involved is poor-quality sleep, and the dry pressurized cabin air. "I've seen people disoriented a week after a flight", commented Conrad Moreira, medical director at the Travel Doctor-TM-VC clinic in Sydney, who prescribes a range of sleep-inducing drugs; anxious flyers included. These are tablets that contain melatonin, produced naturally in the body in sleep promotion.

The travel industry in general is anxious to find a solution to the extreme disorientation and discomfort that accompanies long-range flights, not just for passengers but for their own staff. IATA's latest fatigue-management manual indicates that some cabin crew may spend close to 21 hours awake on the day of a long-haul flight, despite an official duty period shorter than ten hours.

It is expected that data coming out of this first, experimental non-stop flight halfway around the world will render new and useful data, since scientists and medical researchers were meant to be present in the cabin, making a high-altitude laboratory out of Qantas's new Boeing Co. Dreamliner. During flight hours the scientists will have screened the pilots' brains for alertness, as well as monitoring food, sleep and activity of the fifty passengers on board.

Pilots will wear brain monitors during the nearly 20-hour flight.

Source: Qantas

Disruptive Passenger Threats on Air Flights

"The kind of behaviours that ... might be acceptable on the ground take on a completely different complexion when you’re in the air."
"I don’t think anybody knows exactly the reason driving the rise. Perhaps it’s just reflective of societal changes where anti-social behaviour is more prevalent and perhaps more accepted."
"For bar operators and restaurateurs, we’re also saying to them, look: you also have a responsibility to make sure ... you’re not promoting binge drinking."
"We expect to see more countries become parties to the 2014 international treaty allowing authorities to arrest passengers at a plane's destination] protocol in the coming weeks and months ahead."
Tom Colehan, IATA’s assistant director of government and industry affairs

‘Frustrations with journey’ believed to account for increase in plane rage. Photograph: Sam Diephuis/Getty Images

The latest report including statistics by the airlines industry's main trade group, the International Air Transport Association, reveals that incidents of air rage are on the increase. That violence is expressed by some passengers on some flights, somewhere in the world is no big mystery; the news media always carries coverage of those events. Let's face it, when you're in a confined space with a horde of strangers, seated uncomfortably, anxious for the flight to be over, until you're back on solid ground anxiety over misadventure allayed, the second worst possible scenario other than the plane running into mechanical problems is passengers creating an incident threatening the flight.

And threaten the flight they do. Creating disruptive events and spreading fear among other passengers that their psychotic and all-too-often alcoholic displays of loss of control tinged with a perceived level of disinterest in the welfare of everyone sharing the flight, creates an atmosphere of terror. Mind, it isn't only passengers on air flights who occasionally display irritated episodes of bad and threatening behaviour; there are times when airlines employees themselves create episodes of alarming displays of abuse, sometimes with violence thrown in for good measure.

As when infamously, security personnel on a United Airlines plane manhandled a passenger seated in his allocated space that he had paid for and who was anticipating a trouble-free flight because he knew he was expected the next morning to conduct surgery on a patient, who refused to obey the dictate that he relinquish his seat because the airlines had overbooked the flight and seats were needed, not for passengers in the lurch, but for transiting airlines employees. Still, it is the issue of passengers themselves acting out and behaving atrociously, creating tense and dangerous situations in flight that the IATA report singularly addressed.

An increase in the number of serious incidents where alcohol and violence were involved when travellers imbibed in the former and exerted the latter, that has become an increasingly troublesome concern where airlines must react by having their staffs physically restrain a growing number of disorderly passengers. The statistics indicate a 50 percent rise in 2016 over the year before, with 169 passengers globally forcibly confined. This confinement resulted as a reaction to everything from verbal threats and physical abuse to life-threatening actions, including efforts by passengers to enter the plane cockpit.

An intoxicated passenger struggled to breach the cockpit door of an American Airlines plane en route to Honolulu, necessitating the escort of the flight by fighter jets until the fright was resolved, the plane landed, the obstreperous passenger removed. The types of incidents vary, but what remains unvarying is the threat is there and it is growing, and the airlines must face the need to respond while at the same time reassuring other passengers that the flight is not being imperilled. Aside from which airlines now must be aware of local laws enabling prosecutions for offences. Moreover, airline crews must be trained to respond to violence.

As it happens, the total number of reported incidents of passenger disruptions in flight fell by close to ten percent to 9,837, but the proportion considered to represent a higher risk was increased from 2015 figures. One incident was reported for one of every 1,434 flights on average, while in twelve percent of such incidents physical assault occurred, and a third of all incidents involving 3,288 passengers were linked to intoxication, among which 444 events were noted as cases that had physically escalated.

As for those incidents related to safety rules, linked offences involved passengers smoking on board, in the main cabin or in the bathrooms. Such figures, accounting for 190 of the world's airlines "are likely to significantly underestimate the extent of the problem", cautioned Tim Colehan, IATA's assistant director for external affairs.

Coming to an Airline Near You....

"I never would have thought I'd still be flying at 65 [years of age, post-retirement]."
"The jets I used to fly were highly automated. But now, with the propeller planes, I can enjoy a freer, more visual kind of flying. It means getting back to the basics as a pilot."
"When you're young, you can pull an all-nighter. But I read the textbooks [to attain a new commercial flying license] in half-hour chunks. At my age, you have to manage your time."
"I have at least three years left, maybe five [before mandatory retirement at age 70]. As long as I have my health, I want to make the most of them."
Shigekazu Miyazaki, Nagasaki, Japan

"If places like Germany and the United States are raising the age where people can collect pensions to 67, there's no reason Japan shouldn't go to 70."
"We're reaching a point where a 40-year career is just half the average life span, and having people become inactive too early is unsustainable."
Atsushi Seike, expert, labour economics, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan

Airline pilots appear to be in short supply world-wide. Partially this is a factor of new airlines opening in heavily populated parts of the world where, as for example in China, the middle-class is exploding and with disposable income people are becoming more invested in tourism, flying to and seeing other parts of the world they live in, near and abroad. Airline pilots are in high demand, as a result.

Mr. Miyazaki at age 65, retiring from four decades at All Nippon Airways, the largest airline in Japan where 65 is the top for employment, was given an offer of employment that he felt he just couldn't turn down. And which took him right back to doing what he most enjoyed in life; flying. The new airline for which he has become an employee doesn't recognize an age ceiling of 65; he was hired for his experience and his ability by Oriental Air Bridge, flying between Nagasaki to a group of remote islands.

Mr. Miyazaki is quite happy that his work life has been extended. At the same time he is reminded of his age when he realizes how difficult it is for his elder brain to function as it once did as for example, studying for a new license to enable him to fly the Dash 8s the new airline uses. The 39-seat propeller aircraft has an instrument-crammed dashboard, nothing whatever like the jets he was accustomed to flying during his commercial flying career.

His co-pilots are young enough to be his grandsons. And while he's enjoying the new challenge and the opportunity to go on piloting aircraft through the skies over Japan, the transition has been demanding of him. So that he admits to having felt "a little uneasy" with the need to study to enable him to pass the tests to acquire his new pilot's license. It took him eight months to complete the study-test-license process. So he knows his brain has slowed down, its cells grown a little whiter than grey.

True, Japan has the distinction of being known as having the world's longest life expectancy. And because of the pride Japan takes in its 'homogeneity' (read resistance to immigration from other parts of the world), plus its low birth rate, it suffers a general shortage of workers as the population fails to grow other than among its aged population. Over half of Japanese men over 65 years of age perform paid employment of some kind.

Unemployment stands at an enviable 2.8 percent; enviable if there were enough younger workers to fuel Japanese production. Adequate staff to fill the need of employers is difficult to come by even while retirees draining the pension system, alarms government sufficiently to raise the benefit age from 65 to 67, something other nations' economies are persuading them to turn to as well.

When Mr. Miyazaki flew for All Nippon Airline as captain of Boeing 767s mostly to southeast Asia, his salary was generous at several hundred thousand annually, with an excellent pension Oriental Air Bridge, a tiny airline, can afford to compensate him with roughly a third of his former salary. But it is not the salary that has any measure of importance to this man; it is the opportunity to continue flying; compensation is secondary; he has a new lease on extending his professional career.

He emphasizes that to qualify for his new flying license he underwent physical testing that was more rigorously extensive than what a younger candidate would face inclusive of MRIs, electrocardiograms, treadmill tests for stamina. He managed to pass to achieve his prized license. At the present time under federal regulations he can continue flying commercially until reaching age 67; even so government is considering raising the maximum age to 70.

One can only wonder what airline passengers think, what goes through their minds when a pilot the age of their grandfathers clambers into the cockpit to ferry them to remote places, and perhaps whether they will reach their destination. Mr. Miyazaki is having a great old time, and he may have many more healthy and active years to live, but the profession of an airline pilot is one upon which many paying passengers depend on the assumption that the man in command of the vessel is hale as well as experienced in the air, that his reaction time is not age-impaired.

The rise of budget airlines in Asia is said to be one reason why Japan raised the maximum age limit for pilots of commercial airliners to 67 from 65.    Travel Pulse