The ridiculous departure time of the Dublin-Tallinn isn’t so much to do with it being late at night, so much as the flight not being long enough to really class as ‘overnight’. It’s a 3 hour long flight, plus a 2 hour time difference, so you leave at 01:30, and arrive at 06:30. So, technically you get on at night and get off in the morning, but three hours is a really nasty length to actually try to sleep. And, unless you’re one of the rare breed of travellers who can sleep through takeoff and landing, the actual “lights off” section of the flight is only about an hour and half. This of course is the optimal period to gain negative value from sleep and wake up feeling much worse than when you started.
That is, of course, if you can actually get to sleep on the plane at all. The seats aren’t particularly comfortable, and the headrests have way too little padding, and all far too low in the seat to be useful unless you’re ludicrously short. The plane seemed full of people contorted into strange shapes to try to find some level of comfort somewhere. One girl with exceptionally skinny legs even managed to sit rotated around 90 degrees in her seat, with both legs squeezed under the armrest into the aisle, in just the right place to trip up everyone trying to pass.
Arriving in Tallinn that early in the morning also seems to have another negative: only one exit lane open at passport control. On my previous visit there were 3 lanes open, and everyone got through in under 5 minutes. This morning it took almost half an hour.
Being able to fly from Dublin was certainly convenient but I certainly wish they flew during the day, rather than just at night!
[…] My sleep habits have been seriously disturbed since moving here. The overnight flight to get here knocked things out straightaway, and in some ways I still haven’t really recovered. I always have difficulty adjusting to the time difference when moving east, and although I didn’t really expect two hours to be significant, I’m mostly having to work on UK time so I often find myself automatically subtracting 2 hours when I look at a clock. The bright streetlights outside my bedroom window aren’t helping much either, as I’ve gotten used over the last 8 years to living far enough outside the city for there to be no artificial light at night. Then, for much of this week, I found myself in the interesting position of having to do work in the middle of the night UK time, when servers would be at their least busy, whilst having to discus the plans for this on Japanese time! I don’t think I’ve managed to get to sleep before 4am all week. […]
I was on the same flight 🙂 Greetings from another Irishman in Tallinn ! I work for Skype part-time while doing some inter-disciplinary MSc research.