Air travel is not for everyone. Whether you’re afraid of heights, your wallet can’t cover the rising cost of a ticket, or you’re too tall to cram yourself into the ever-dwindling confines of a seat, there are many conceivable reasons as to why someone would forgo a trip in a flying aluminum can in favor of four-wheeled travel. For the brave souls who can look past all of the prerequisite fears of boarding an airplane, and find it in themselves to surrender to their small uncomfortable seat, there may also be the threat of losing sleep that makes flying that much less appealing. Jet lag is rarely inescapable when flying across time zones due to our pesky circadian rhythm telling our bodies when night and daytime should occur. But what if you could cut off your own biology at the pass? This was the subject of a recent partnership between the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre, Australian airline Qantas, and industrial design company Caon Design Office. The group tested a lighting method in airplane passenger cabins that mimics the natural lighting of the plane’s final destination. The results will be part of a series of Qantas ultra-long-haul flights called Project Sunrise. Courtesy of iStock.com/frantic00. An airplane’s cabin with the sunrise setting. Courtesy of Quantas. The design is the product of more than 150 h of testing in the Airbus Customer Definition Centre in Hamburg, Germany, where representatives from the three entities created and tested hundreds of lighting patterns and sequences in a mock Airbus A350 cabin. The researchers used light with high melanopic illuminance to simulate different parts of the day. Melanopic illuminance affects circadian rhythms rather than regular old illuminance and dictates how the brain will set its internal clock. The researchers found that blue-enriched light with high melanopic illuminance helps to shift body clocks. Meanwhile, long-wavelength light (such as red light) with low melanopic illuminance does a better job at preventing the clock from shifting in an undesired direction. Rounds of trials produced 12 unique lighting scenes for the Project Sunrise flights. They included an “awake” scene that lets passengers adjust to the destination time zone, a “sunset” scene for transitioning passengers from day to night by moving through the colors of a sunset into a night sky with moonlight and slow cloud effects, and a “sunrise” scene featuring the simulation of a sunrise rolling from the front of the cabin to the rear. Unfortunately, there is no scene labeled “happy hour” just yet, but depending on how you like to travel, every air mile can be flown during happy hour. If the project goes well, we could soon see a new era of comfortable and somewhat immersive travel through the sky. But until then, prepare to be a bit groggy when traveling from Australia to Monaco, Nigeria to Cambodia, or California to Massachusetts. And brace yourself for some sticker shock when you see the price of extra leg room.