Red Eye Flights from Uk to US?
 

Hi I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas,
me and my family travel to Orlando every other year we usually have awful times for flights etc arriving into the US late and wasting our first day,
my question is, is there any evening/night flights that go from the UK into the US? We were thinking of flying on the Sunday evening and hopefully arriving in the US for the morning so we have a full first day!

I do hire a car when we are out there so driving isn't an issue in terms of which airport we land in or we can try and look at connecting flights etc

thanks in advance!

The time change works against you. The latest nonstop departure from the UK to the US that I could find (Heathrow to JFK) leaves at 20:05 (8:05 PM) and arrives around 11 PM. Any flights leaving the UK in the evening and arriving in the US in the morning typically will have long layovers at some connection point, such as Iceland.

The airlines have long established how they manage their fleets. The planes aren't earning any revenue when they're parked on the tarmac, so the typical schedule is overnight flights eastbound and daytime flights westbound, so that the planes can "turn around" after cleaning and refueling. There are a few morning departures from the US to the UK, e.g. say a 7 AM departure from New York to Heathrow, landing at 8 PM local time, but usually the aircraft that make those trips either continue to some other destination - in Asia or Africa, for example - or in a few cases the planes sit overnight at Heathrow then return to the US in the early morning. I'm sure if there was greater demand for other times the airlines might respond, but it doesn't seem that there is.

Welcome to Fodors. Because you are flying west across 5 time zones the timing doesn't work. The latest nonstop flight would be around 4PM and arrive about 7:30 or 8PM. So you could eat dinner and head straight to bed afterwards. AFAIK there are no red eyes to the east coast without connecting somewhere making for a gawd awful travel time of more than 24 hours.

But really IMO your best bet would be to take a relatively early flight and arrive in Orlando in the early to mid afternoon.

For some reason I didn't see Gardyloo's post . . . he explained it better than I did :)

You'll have to spend that time somewhere. Perhaps in theory you could do that if you have a connection and stayed overnight someplace enroute, but you aren't going to be saving travel time that way.

If you arrive late, that is the flights you are picking, you can pick, a flight that arrives 2-3 pm. That sounds pretty good to me as it gives you time to get to your place, settle in and have dinner, etc. I don't know where you are going or what you are doing there. but obviously you'd still have evening if you aren't dead by then. I am when I return from Europe and get into US around 3 pm. After such long travel, rental, etc, I think the first day is kind of wasted anyway, and just settling in, having dinner, relaxing, etc, sounds like a better plan to me for arrival day anyway.