Human guinea pigs prepare for first 20-hour flight

Bloomberg

For decades, travellers have stoically endured jet lag as an unavoidable menace on long journeys. Now, as airlines push for record-breaking non-stop flights halfway around the planet, efforts to counter the debilitating symptoms are turning into a billion-dollar industry.
Fresh insight into the physical and emotional toll of ultra-long haul travel should emerge when Qantas Airways Ltd flies direct from New York to Sydney. No airline has ever completed that route without stopping. At nearly 20 hours, it’s set to be the world’s longest flight, leaving the US on Friday and landing in Australia during its Sunday morning.
This will be more than an endurance exercise. Scientists and medical researchers in the cabin will turn Qantas’s brand-new Boeing Co Dreamliner into a high-altitude laboratory. They’ll screen the brains of the pilots for alertness, while monitoring the food, sleep and activity of the few dozen passengers. The aim is to see how humans hold up to the ordeal.
The proliferation of super-long flights — Singapore Airlines Ltd resumed non-stop services to New York last year — is partly driven by the development of lighter, more aerodynamic aircraft that can fly further.

Heading Down Under
The physical burden on customers is putting a renewed focus on jet lag, and creating a supermarket of products and home-made creations to ease the suffering. In that shopping basket: melatonin tablets, Pfizer Inc’s anti-anxiety medication Xanax, and Propeaq light-emitting glasses that claim to get the body back on track. And yes, there’s an app for that and many other potential remedies.
The potential customer base is staggering. The International Air Transport Association expects some 4.6 billion people to take a flight in 2019, a total that will jump to 8.2 billion in 2037.
No airline has ever completed this 20-hour route.
Demand for jet-lag therapies is growing at about 6% each year and the industry will be worth $732 million in 2023, according to BIS Healthcare.
The broader sleeping-disorder market — dominated by pills — is worth $1.5 billion and will swell to $1.7 billion by 2023, GlobalData says, adding that more than 80 drugs targeting disturbed sleep are in clinical development.
Jet lag typically strikes when a traveller crosses three times zones or more in quick order, leaving the body’s internal clock running to the timetable at home. The chief complaint after touching down is often overwhelming fatigue during the day or merciless insomnia at night. The fallout can be worse heading east, because traveling in that direction effectively reverses the normal day-and-night cycle.
Unsettling as they are, those ailments barely do jet lag justice.
Each of the billions of cells in the human body has its own clock, and vital processes including heart function, food absorption and metabolism are all disrupted when organs get out of step, said Carrie Partch, a biochemist and associate professor at the University of California Santa Cruz who has studied the circadian rhythm for 20 years.
“Jet lag is more than just an inconvenience,” Partch said in an interview. “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.”