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Book a night flight if you can. Make sure you take lots of snacks and load a tablet up with cartoons!

@Mrs.Lilac: we did a lot of "practice" screen time with our younger LO in the lead up to our trip this summer. It took awhile, but she finally became interested, and now she's a little too interested in screen time.

Just got back from a transatlantic trip with my 13 month old. We had a ipad with videos and a few apps (one called Monsters) was his favorite. Snacks were a major help. I also brought s bunch of random craft supplies - puff balls, pipe cleaners, ribbon, fabric scraps, etc. He'd never really seen such things and loved them. Bonus of not caring if they get lost in the seats. Good luck!

We took our 14 month old to England, which is not quite as far (about 8 hours) but did many of the things other people have suggested. The bassinet especially is super helpful to give them someplace to lie down. New books and toys, and B liked watching a cartoon on the seat-back tv plus Sesame St on the iPad. Lots of walking up and down the aisle, lots of snacks, and some new books/toys to pull out when everything else starts to fail.

Oh and our flight has a layover (no direct flights to where we are going from our location) but it's 12h total

First- don't stress too much! We just flew 10/11-hours to Europe and back (from CA) in June with my then-11 month old and it was awesome! I stressed and planned so much in advance and in the end she was so easy (and not typically an easy baby). Maybe some of the planning helped...
Must-have was an Ergo to get on/off the plane (and just generally around Europe - especially in some museums where they didn't allow our stroller). We held her as a lap infant and made sure to reserve a bassinet in advance. Virgin Atlantic had a horrible bassinet that was basically useless (two huge seatbelt straps across either end of the bassinet right over where the baby's head goes...so totally freaked out baby and she wouldn't go back to sleep there when placed in it). Air France (on the way back) had an AWESOME bassinet and baby slept like a rock in it.

It was hugely helpful to schedule the flights during times when baby was more liable to sleep.

Make sure you get bulkhead seats if possible, as baby can use the extra leg room to play on the floor between you and hubby's legs. I brought tons of new things and some of those indestructables books she'd never seen before. I also brought stickers but never even got to those. She mostly entertained herself with the cups and utensils and straws the flight attendants brought.

I had never shown her any screen time at that point and didn't see the need to start just for our trip, and so she never needed it on the flight.

For the flight with the crappy bassinet I nursed her to sleep on a travel Boppy pillow in my lap (SOOO good for travel - we don't even use a Boppy at home but they are amazing for LO to sleep on your lap and save your arms on the plane) and she snoozed under the nursing cover for hours (nursing cover helped block out the ambiant light that remains from being near exits/bathrooms even when they turn out most of the lights). Since it was an overnight flight I then transferred her to my husband so I could get a few hours of sleep myself, and she slept snuggled against his chest, so cute. Something about the white noise of the plane and maybe the subtle motion really knocked her out.

We had lots of interesting snacks (puffs, happy creamies, little yogis, Tiny Fruits, some pouches) but she also loved the bits of our airplane food meals we cut up and shared with her. She also loved people watching everyone around us and trying to make friends (even though she's not normally friendly at all...I'm convince she just LOVES to fly or something!)

On the flight back she LOVED having another young toddler seated on the bulkhead row with us and they spent the flight smiling and waving at each other and he kept doing a funny dance trying to impress her. It was beyond precious.

Try not to stress too much. I probably did several hours of googling "Flying with 11 month old" and "best toys for flying with 11 month old" etc. and found lots of tips on various blogs, including this one.

Mostly, have a GREAT time!

@Mrs.Lilac: We're planning on flying 16 hours when K is 13 months too

@stratosphere: That's me right now! I can't even get motivated to plan our trip b/c I'm just dreading it!

@Mrs.Lilac: The travel Boppy is just slightly smaller than the regular but it folds up and zips into a puffy half-moon with a carrying strap. It is a bit bulky but very light and for me was totally worth it to bring along just for the flights. That said, she was a lap infant, and you have a seat for yours, so you might not need one at all.

You're right, Virgin didn't let us reserve a bulkhead/bassinet in advance, now that I think of it. They "noted it" on our reservation but told us just to show up to the airport early to ensure that other families with infants didn't get the bulkhead seats first. (They don't release them until flight check-in.) We got to the airport about 3 hours early and got bulkhead seats but there were several families in line right behind us who weren't so lucky! So I'd recommend getting there 3.5 hours early to be safe. Maybe 4. On the way back (we flew Virgin into London, took the Eurostar to Paris, then Air France back from Paris) our Uber driver made us late to the airport and we only got there 2 hours in advance and there was only one seat left on any bulkhead row (Air France had "reserved" a bassinet for us, but that only meant one adult seat on the bulkhead row! I don't think there's any consistency among airlines on this, or even at the same airline). So I took the one seat so we'd have a bassinet and then we had to beg, borrow and steal to get someone to switch with my husband so he could sit beside me.

The bulkhead seats do recline. Their armrests don't come up, though, as that's where they put the video systems and trays. So that's the one downside to that row, if you want to put the armrests up between all three seats you'll have...but you'll have a car seat in one of them anyway, right? So not a difference there for you. I just found the extra legroom and floor space to be hugely helpful.

We didn't bring a car seat because we only did train/Tube/Metro travel once in Europe except for the taxi rides to/from the airports. In London we found a car service with car seats (that said, it showed up incorrectly installed so I had to quickly reinstall it correctly before I let our driver leave the parking area!). In Paris we didn't look too hard and just took an Uber van (we had SOOO much stuff) and took our chances. I was sweating bullets that whole ride to CDG with baby strapped to my chest in the Ergo, we were sitting rear facing, me with a seatbelt strapped into the van's rear-facing bench, my theory being that if we got into a collision, the major force would send her head back into my chest that way.

As for jet lag, we had no problem at all with it in Europe. We arrived around 11am London time and she slept in the van on the drive from LHR into town. Then we put her in the stroller while it was sunny out and went for a long walk in our neighborhood (we got an AirBnB in Notting Hill) and I think the sun exposure during her new daytime hours helps a TON. We tried to keep her up until her normal afternoon nap time (in the new time zone) but when they're super tired you just gotta roll with it. Then we all stayed up as long as possible that first night and I think we all got to bed around 10pm local time. She adjusted within two days, but that said, we never fully adjusted her to European time. We found it far better to make her new bedtime 10:30-11pm so we could all go out to dinner together some nights (plus it was June so it stayed light until 10pm anyway!). She then would sleep in until 9am, later some mornings. It was heaven. I don't know how we got so lucky (she is not typically a great sleeper at home) but we were pinching ourselves! That said, we did re-sleep train the first night there and I think it made all the difference (we do a method that's worked super well for her that allows five minutes of crying, then brief check-in/hugs/love, then another five minutes, repeat until asleep.)

We brought our Bjorn travel crib and she hadn't slept in it for months at home but she loved it on the trip. There was also a heat wave while we were there and I think she kind of liked sleeping in the heat, too. (Where we live it is kind of chilly year-round, so she only rarely sleeps without a sleepsack.)

On the way back home the jetlag was worse. It took probably 10 days to readjust entirely (we were in Europe for 2.5 weeks). But it was so worth it. I honestly look back on that trip as the best thing we have done since LO was born--and I almost chickened out and didn't do it due to thinking it was going to be too hard!

We brought an umbrella stroller along with the Ergo and would just put the Ergo in the basket for every day out and then switch her back and forth between them if she was struggling napping or got fussy in one. We'd collapse the stroller for going on the Tube or Metro and put her in the Ergo for that, which tended to be too crowded for strollers, not to mention Paris has no escalators on the Metro so it's all about the Ergo. Sometimes she'd nap in the Ergo, sometimes in the stroller (which she NEVER does at home - but I think the bumpy cobbled streets, esp in the Marais in Paris, put her right to sleep!).

I was astonished at how adaptable she was and how much she loved all the new sights, sounds, smells and tastes. I think 11 months was the perfect age to have taken a big trip like that. She was "switched on" enough to really take stuff in (she pointed at all the sculptures in the V&A in London! And she loved Picasso's crazy sculptures at the Picasso museum in Paris--pointing at them insistently like "Can you believe this??") but she wasn't walking yet, so she was content to ride around in the stroller and Ergo with periodic breaks in parks to stretch her legs and practice standing and cruising (around the stroller or a bench, etc.). She is walking everywhere now, so it would have been a different trip with less museum time for Mom and Dad, if we'd gone now. But I still strongly believe that travel with kids/babies is awesome and you'll likely be pleasantly surprised at how it goes.

That said, we did choose London/Paris as our first major trip destination because they are so safe, easy to get around, and we already knew them both quite well (we lived in London for a few years a decade ago and we visited Paris many times during those years, but it had been a long time since we'd been to either city so it was amazing to go back, this time with a BABY!)

Good luck, you've got this - the fact you're here researching means you'll do great. Please come back and update us after the trip!! Would be great to share any other tips you come up with for future mamas doing research (I found these threads SO HELPFUL when I was trip planning and doing searches on HB).

@stratosphere: wow thank you for taking the time to write all that. I have SOOO much anxiety surround our upcoming trip *that we havent even booked yet* but now I have hope that maybe we don't give enough credit to our kids! I'll be going to from NY to HK for 2 weeks. Super long flight, 12 hr difference, and DD will be 13 months.

Following.. I'm taking my 10 month old to Australia in feb... Jet lag and the solo flight back are probably my biggest worry.

As for jetlag, I find it is worse flying east to west. We flew from Europe to the US this summer and had an 8 hour time difference. It took my LOs 5 solid days to get over the jetlag. Coming back, it took slightly less, especially for my older LO since he got a good night's sleep on the return flight.