Peter Cochrane's Video Blog: Silent flights

Hi, this is Peter Cochrane for silicon.com from my UK office and in a moment I'll be 35,000ft mid Atlantic. Over the many years that I’ve been travelling, people have often asked me - how do I manage to sleep on aircraft? And the answer comes in three parts: One – a decent seat, on a long haul flight that means getting horizontal. The second component are these – earplugs. Pushing these into the inner ear, really firmly gives me an immediate 15dB suppression or more of the noise in the cabin. And I back these up with a pair of fully cupped noise-cancelling headphones. I’m now in excess of 30dB down on the cabin noise and it is that cabin noise that actually makes you very tired indeed. That’s why I can wake up after a flight and feel refreshed. Just to hammer home this point I've repeated this blog at 35,000ft in the dark and I'm now going to run that for you. So take a look and take a listen and I'm sure you’ll get the idea. See you next time. So here we are at 35,000ft. I'm all plugged in, cupped and ready to sleep. You may hear the passengers' announcements in a few moments so I’ll make this short. Just listen to the noise level. My mouth and microphone distance are exactly the same as the recording I made from my office. No wonder it gets tiring on a flight…