Hi!
I only experienced the well known "red-eye" flight once. That was in August 1998 when I started my way back to Portugal from
FAT. The reason I reserved that flight was because I wanted to take the rest of the family for a few hours visit to NYC, so instead of sleeping in the Big Apple and waste a fortune why not save that money and visit some sights there? So that's what we did, we left
FAT at 5:00 pm to
LAX in a Skywest EMB120, then we spent some 5 hours at
LAX, for me it was great because I could spot the lovely airplanes but my wife and kids were not that happy. Finnally we boarded our
UA flight late at night, it was a 767-200 N601UA, I think the first airline 767 builted. The flight was good during most of the night, although we didn't rest that much it was awesome to see the sun rising close to land at
JFK, just fantastic. Then it was time to get a cab to Manhattan and see the city waking up. We visited Empire State, Statue of Liberty, WTC and it was time to get back to
JFK, our next flight was waiting for us,
JFK/
LGW in a nice
BA 767-300ER. I think the sacrifice we all did to have those hours in NYC were not in vain, if we didn't do it we could have lost the chance to see the WTC. So for me red-eye flights are great!
regards