Surviving Those Long Flights.

Surviving Those Long Flights

We all know the symptoms: a dry throat, sore eyes, stiff back, cramped muscles, throbbing head. It comes from sitting for hours in a cramped seat designed for vertically challenged circus performers, a meal tray that you can`t get down over your stomach when the guy in front rams hit seat back. Plus low humidity ( 0 to 15 percent ) and lack of fresh air -- airlines instruct pilots to turnoff air-conditioning packs to save fuel. Which adds up to feeling that the airline may not be doing all it can to ensure your comfort and health.

Premium cabins, of course, allow you space to stretch out and suffer in comfort. But well-being in the air depends a lot on the quality of air in the cabin (at least 50 percent of which is recirculated). And this can depend on the efficiency of catalytic air filters, which remove harmful ozone ( a short, hard cough is typical of ozone -- along with eye discomfort, nose and throat irritation and headache) and high levels of carbon dioxide. Oxygen shortage can lead to euphoria, behavioral changes, memory impairment and lack of judgment and physical coordination.

There are two issues here, according to Richard Dawood, a London-based specialist in travel medicine and editor of Traveler's Health: the way you feel during the flight and jet lag.

"The two things are completely different," Dawood said. "If you took a 10-hours car journey back home you`d feel much the same -- having been up all night in cramped conditions, all of the environmental things. Jet lag steps in subsequently when your body tries to do things at all the wrong times."

"A lot of the discomfort you feel in the cabin is not due to dehydration through the atmosphere, but because you are stuck n your seat, "Dawood continued. "Dry air is a factor in making your eyes, nasal passages and throat uncomfortable -- but only a minor factor in fluid loss. What happens when you`re setting upright in an incredibly uncomfortable position is squashing the central blood vessels, which makes it more difficult for blood to get back to the heart.

"The effect of that is so shift fluid out of the bloodstream into the tissues where it's not valuable to the circulation. So your feet and legs swell. By the end of the flight you may have about four pounds of fluid that is sequestered in the tissues. Unless you drink water, you are dehydrated by that amount."

Much more alarming is the risk of a blood clot forming the veins of your legs. This can be life threatening if the clot detaches and goes to the heart. Research carried out in the United States confirmed what doctors have long suspected -- 50 percent of patients suffering blood clots ( or DVT, deep vein thrombosis) had recently been in the air for four hours or more. Don`t ignore pains in the calf muscles or chest when you arrived. Seek medical advice.

Keep Stretching

The prescription is to stretch your legs as often as you can, and take a minute every so often to contact and relax your calf muscles during the flight to pump blood up through your veins. Turn your feet in circles from the ankles, first in one direction, then in the other. Stretch your feet with your toes pointing upward. Hold for a minute, then breathe out and relax. Drink plenty of water - at least a pint every three hours -- but avoid alcohol, coffee, chocolate and tea, which promote dehydration, and eat sparingly.

Bring a neck-support pillow or wedge a pillow behind your neck, take a nasal saline spray and moisturizer or water atomizer to refresh the skin and wear loose-fitting clothes, Dawood advises against wearing contact lenses for any flight longer than four hours.

But the best advice is to find a plane where you have space to stretch out.

The ideal position to travel is horizontal. Nothing beats stretching out across four seats in economy -- better than business class where you can`t put the armrests up.

On a wide-body plane, you can increase the odds of having an empty seat next to you by asking for an aisle seat in the center section. At least you can stretch your legs in the aisle from time to time. Avoid the middle seat at all costs. Most wide-bodies and some marrow-bodies have exit doors in the middle of the cabin. The seat rows right behind those doors have extra legroom. In narrow-bodies, seats next to the emergency exits over the wings usually have more legroom.

When it comes to medical emergencies, such as cardiac arrest, you cannot rely -- as airlines do -- on a doctor being on board, or at least the right sort of doctor.

But you might be lucky. On an Aer Lingus flight from Frankfurt to Dublin, a passenger had a heart attack and the call went out for the doctor. Thirty-five hands shop up -- cardiologists on their way to a conference with all their equipment! But only a handful of carries - including Virgin Atlantic, American Airlines and Qantas -- carry automatic defibrillators that can safety be used by trained cabin staff. This is may be your hope of survival on a plane far from land.

Travelers with circulatory, pulmonary or cardiac conditions should be aware that low humidity and pressurization can seriously alter the effects of medication. Consult your physician. And check which airlines carry the drugs you need.

Better still, carry your own drugs in hand luggage. Asthmatic patients will take their inhalers and salbutamol with them. But for a severe attack, you may need steroids. Diabetic traveling through several time zones may need to carry injectable glycogen or dextrose.