Originally Posted by
theasianguy
Controversial opinion, but as a West Coast resident, I actually prefer these red eye flights for personal and leisure travel to the East. I travel 4+ times a year to visit family from SFO, and more often than not, I end up taking the red eye. It's usually cheaper and lets me maximize my work day in California. I just stay up the entire flight, arrive at 5-6am, and immediately sleep after arriving at my destination. I'll wake up late morning after sleeping around 3 hours, and remain mostly functional the rest of the day.
4-6pm departures are ideal but any major delay means you're arriving past midnight and get the same crappy sleep as the red-eye. For personal travel, I actively avoid a 7-9am departure when flying East for 2+ time zones, since I tend to not sleep well the night before AND lose the entire day when going east.
While I used to be ardently anti-redeye and still prefer daytime flights (I don't mind "wasting" an entire day traveling), I view both of these as viable options for true transcons (i.e., SFO-EWR not SFO-ORD), especially if the price and schedule are right. As a night owl, I don't mind the earlier redeyes that leave the west coast by 9pm and arrive on the east coast by 5am--I also stay up the entire flight and sleep for several hours upon arrival at ~3am PT, though hopefully for more than three hours. When I lived on the east coast, I loved the 3-4pm departures when visiting the west coast to give me over half a day before my flight home while avoiding the redeye, but nowadays as a west coast resident I find their use cases somewhat more limited.