9 things to do when you’re bored on a long flight

If you’re like me and can’t sleep on any form of transport, you’ll be familiar with the endless monotony of being in a dark plane full of sleeping people. The minute hand on your watch moves as if through treacle, each hour seemingly taking two and the arrival time at your destination never getting any nearer.

You’re tired but not sleepy; you can eat but you’re not hungry; thirsty but not enough to go and wake the cabin crew. So how do you pass those dreary moments?

Here are a few suggestions of things you can count to keep yourself occupied next time you’re stuck in that situation. Maybe you’ve tried these yourself (let me know, it will be good to know that I’m not a complete freak).

1. Number of countries you’ve been to. Of course you need to decide on what defines a country (do dependencies and overseas territories count?) and what defines a visit (airport layover? re-fuelling stop? overnight?)

2. Number of flights you’ve taken in your life. Count either take-offs or landings; they should be just about equal.

3. Number of different airports you’ve ever flown to or from. Don’t forget to include any flying lessons and skydiving exploits you might have enjoyed.

4. How many hotel rooms you’ve ever slept in. This illuminating post from Wandering Earl reassures me that others engage in these boredom-busting activities.

5. The total time you’ve spent on planes. This is a tricky calculation as you need to include time spent waiting on the aircraft before take-off and after landing. I reckon I have clocked up around six weeks of my life on planes; a sobering thought.

6. Your age in months. I was thrilled a little while ago to learn that I was fast approaching my 500th birthday. Sadly I then forgot about it until a week after the big day, by which time it felt wrong to celebrate the occasion. I’ll be sure not to miss the big 1-0-0-0.

7. Have you visited a city beginning with every letter of the alphabet? Once I remembered our trip to Xi’an in China the rest was very straightforward.

8. Have you been away from home in every month of the year? It is only by contemplating this question that I realised how we travel so rarely in November, February or March.

Finally, and most pertinently, I inevitably end up guessing the time – in other words how long it’s been since I last looked at my watch.

Help me out – if there are other things I should be deliberating on my next flight I need to know.

(A special thanks to my old mate Steve who inspired this post after our night out this week, when I let slip the many geeky things that all too often occupy my mind)

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26 Responses to “9 things to do when you’re bored on a long flight”

  1. I’m lucky enough to have been travelling since I was 2 but I’m an extremely light sleeper. Since discovering sedatives I’ll never go back to trying to find ways of entertaining myself on long distance flights :)

    March 18, 2011 at 10:31 am
  2. Haha i’ve pretty much done all these things on recent long-haul flights. I’ve even tried to work out what percentage of my life I’ve spent abroad.

    March 18, 2011 at 10:44 am
  3. If you can think of someones birthday or a major event for every day of the year. This usually results in remembering all those birthdays you’ve forgotten but will keep you entertained for a while.

    March 18, 2011 at 11:22 am
  4. Ray Blake #

    Make a list: your personal top 10 (20? 30?) albums, films, books, TV programmes.

    March 18, 2011 at 11:59 am
  5. I have the bad luck to never be able to sleep on a plane, so I planned ahead – and crocheted an entire shawl on a flight to Sri Lanka… you can take a crochet hook onboard – but not knitting needles… Ahem, this is one for the craft folk, isn’t it…

    March 18, 2011 at 12:33 pm
  6. I always pray (dream) I’ll meet a beautiful woman on a flight.
    In reality rarely happens.

    Of all the women… esp remember (a flight to Delhi) this very devoutly religious Muslim lady with veil …glaring at me as I had my first whisky and coke (try and knock myself out with a few)…after that I subjected her to Vicky Christina Barcelona….. :)

    Music helps me anywhere I travel. Rarely do I fall asleep though.
    List is handy, will try it next time:)

    March 18, 2011 at 2:48 pm
  7. Great list.
    I find the easiest way to pass some time is to talk to someone though. It usually makes time fly 😛

    March 18, 2011 at 2:58 pm
  8. Luciana #

    I know the pain… That’s why I’m an absolutely fan of airplanes with individual screens for each seat, I always manage to update my movies list, yeah… long flights… i think the max I got was 4 movies in a flight, with stops during the meals to chat. That’s what i found works best to make me forget the time.

    March 19, 2011 at 1:33 am
  9. gregorylent #

    just meditate the whole flight. and ignore the “food”. there is no need to kill time.

    March 19, 2011 at 8:49 am
  10. Some good mental tips to pass the time in the plane. I actually prefer to leave home in November, February, and March. November is the perfect weather month for hiking and February and March are good for skiing.

    March 19, 2011 at 7:21 pm
  11. Jack #

    I absolutely love the idea of all of this list making to kill time! It speaks to my (self-diagnosed) OCD tendencies. When I need to kill time on flights, my default is to read, and read everything. I read the airline safety cards, the in-flight magazines (especially the retail ones where I can pretend that I may actually have some use for their products) and books I bring with me. When I get bored with that (which I do after a while) I love looking out the window and imagining where we might be. It’s a nice quiet time to reflect/pray if you like. Thank goodness for Advil PM when it comes time to sleep though!

    March 23, 2011 at 9:49 pm
  12. I like #7. I’m going to try that one.

    March 26, 2011 at 3:27 am
  13. I love all the extra suggestions here! Will need to make a revised list – and more importantly take all these new ideas onto my next flight.

    March 26, 2011 at 6:15 pm
  14. My stalwarts are: 1) my trusty rubiks cube. I can solve it – so I spend my time mixing and resolving it over and over and timing myself. It’s a good one for taking your mind off landing. ‘How many times can I finish it before we touch down?’ 2) Writing down the 50 states of the USA in alphabetical order from memory. Then finding all the associations I can with them – when I visited – when I just touched down in them – people I know there – films based there… etc.

    Thinking along the treasure trail lines – could you make up a system of linking every state to every other one by clues? How many state names can you make anagrams from?

    Agree with the OCD comment. I actually enjoy filling the boredom with lists and trivia.

    If you have someone to talk to you also have someone to play ‘boxes’ or ‘hangman’ or ‘battleships’ with!

    Kathy

    March 30, 2011 at 1:13 pm
  15. Count how many list points you need to rack up before officially reaching Rain Man status? 😉
    Or you could lie back, think of England and look forward to your next train journey!

    May 5, 2011 at 7:04 pm
  16. George Bazhenov #

    In Number 2, the figure for landings will not tally with that for take-offs if you are a paratrooper. But then, paratroopers do not have sleeping problems, so why bother?

    May 6, 2011 at 1:12 am
  17. Lucky for me I can fall asleep almost anywhere, at anytime, in record speed. I’ve actually been diagnosed with a condition! :-) Seriously, transportation (buses, cars, planes, trains) seem to work extra well for putting me to sleep!

    June 3, 2011 at 7:22 pm
  18. Some good time passers here. We have some long flights coming up, so we might use some of these.

    My wife and I always try to guess the exact time that the wheels will touch down on our flight before we take off. Once on a cross-country flight she was 42 seconds off. She still brags about that one.

    June 3, 2011 at 11:27 pm
  19. Don’t you worry…you’re definitely not alone with these. I tend to use several of the ideas you listed and some of them I repeat over and over again, never quite reaching the same conclusion.

    And thank you for the link!

    July 10, 2011 at 4:14 pm
  20. Can’t say I have tried even one of these have to bear it in mind next time I am not just taking a short hop over the channel. I have probably spent most log haul flights annoying my fellow passengers by wandering around and chatting away when they just want to watch the the inflight entertainment.

    July 16, 2011 at 10:45 pm
  21. An elaboration on your theme: the alphabet game can be expanded: name a river for every letter of the alphabet; or a town in your home country for every letter; when over land, looking down and imagining yourself driving/walking/cycling along the topography below – what does it look like from ground level? if you are really desperate, remembering first dates back through the fog of time can be amusing!!!

    July 22, 2011 at 3:58 am
  22. I often take a blank crossword from the inflight magazine or other publication and try and fill it with alternative words to the solutions. If the flight is long enough then come up with clues (cryptic or otherwise). This has three advantages 1) I sometimes fall asleep as I close my eyes and contemplate the next possible clues; 2) It keeps my vocabulary memory active; 3) The finished product, if you manage it (I hardly ever do), is potentially saleable.

    Other ideas include: listing all airlines flown, working out the percentage flown with each airline and constructing a league table (Singapore Airlines comes top as I have flown them twice to Oz, Easyjet and BA come second) and planning RTW flights around a certain theme (e.g. Cities with the world’s top 10 tallest buildings)

    November 29, 2011 at 2:29 pm
  23. 457 months!!! Can’t wait for my 500th now… no wait, that would mean that I would be 40! ARrrrghhhh!!

    January 28, 2012 at 2:56 pm
  24. Juliana Fastiggi #

    Great tips! But I’m not the best at math. That might take a really, infuriatingly long time! I like to plug my headphones in and just listen to all the songs you have on your iPod, iPad, iPhone, Android, etc. Then I just annoy whatever family member is flying with me, eat the terrible food they serve, and just bore myself to death for three hours. Is that weird?

    August 15, 2012 at 5:09 pm

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