Qantas Airways to test jet lag with 20-hour flight

For decades, travelers have stoically endured jet lag as an unavoidable menace on long journeys. Now, as airlines push for record-breaking nonstop flights halfway around the planet, efforts to counter the debilitating symptoms are turning into a billion-dollar industry.

The longest haul

Fresh insight into the physical and emotional toll of ultralong haul travel should emerge this weekend 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 U.S. 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’ 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.

Fighting jet lag

A recent industry proliferation of super-long flights is partly driven by the development of lighter, more aerodynamic aircraft that can fly farther. The physical burden on customers is putting a renewed focus on jet lag and creating a supermarket of products and homemade creations to ease the suffering. In that shopping basket: melatonin tablets, anti-anxiety medication and 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. 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 traveler 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 insomnia at night

Business experiment

Friday’s flight from New York, and another from London later this year, are key tests for Qantas as it prepares to start direct commercial services from those cities to Sydney as soon as 2022. If successful, Qantas says other super-long, nonstop routes from Australia’s east coast to South America and Africa might follow. Qantas plans to make a decision to press ahead with these flights, or ditch the idea, by the end of 2019.

Qantas’ stock has soared about fivefold in five years, rising 2.9% Tuesday to its highest since August 2018.

AP 2011 A Qantas plane sits on the tarmac at Heathrow Airport in London. If Qantas’ ultralong flights from New York and London to Australia are successful, it could launch additional long flights.