Originally Posted by marcal

I loved international flying for all the positives but the cumulative effect on me personally was that I was sick all the time. I would get a head cold that would turn into a sinus infection that would last two weeks. I almost had surgery it was so ridiculous.

I don’t know if it was the dry air but I am convinced that it was the cumulative effects of circadian disruption/disjointed sleep(interrupted sleep) that did it. I did exclusively international for seven years and after about two years had these effects.

If you are based on the 330 in NYC, you’re losing two solid sleeps, 4-5x per month. More if you GS. That’s what killed me. Flying through WOCL and breaking the normal sleep patterns that many times per month is for me, a recipe for being sick. A lot.

It is astonishingly different post international flying doing zero red eyes. If I get a sniffle it’s gone in a day. Domestic is way harder work, no doubt but I don’t feel anywhere near as run down in terms of cumulative fatigue.

I loved the aircraft, crews, destinations, etc but it aged me and made it drastically harder to recover from sickness. YMMV. I will never fly an air airplane again that does exclusively international.

1x international or red eye here or there is fine, it was the cumulative effects of it all the time that were hard.