Never suffered jet lag myself. I find as long as you plan accordingly you shouldn't suffer it. If your fly east to west never sleep on the flight, but be prepaired to stay awake for a little longer than usual. and west to east depending on the flight time, try to sleep the whole way if its a night flight so you wake up morning local time like it was just another day. This works Europe to US and US to europe. Also east coast to west coast, and night flights west to east coast. I am sure pilots do it so often they get used to it quickly.

Longest flight I was on was 13 hours, with a 13 hour time difference. I wasn't jet lagged at all. I didn't sleep at all though like Craig said. I got up early in the morning, and stayed up all that day. Then at nite, our really long flight started. When we arrived in China it was still nite and I went to sleep. All was good!

Been on 13 hour flights as well, overseas 747 flights... and whew, i get jet lag for couple days.  While flying east to west, i can never get any sleep anyways (insomnia  , plus those engines are loud)

As for your question, pilots rotate regularly i believe.  Captain flies for a bit, then the first officer.

Well I don't sleep on the flights...want to sometimes, but hey!

For the long long flights (say Sydney to LAX) the 747 has two crews, one takes off, flys for a while, the pilots alternating duties from radios and flying, then about halfway through or so, they get up, the backup crew sits down, and the first crew goes and sleeps or eats or just chills or sits in the cockpit or whatever.

I don't know what my truly longest flight was, but I've been on several trans-Pacific flights including some from New York direct. My longest pilot where I was the one flying is probably the US-Europe routes I fly sometimes right now.

And yes, airline pilots frequently switch duties during flights. I let my copilot fly a lot, but I take over sometimes, sometimes we cooperate to get a task done. It's always one person flying one on the radios with ATC. During low approaches, ones where the weather truly sucks, I will almost always take over, as will pretty much any airline captain. Just some things require experience and if we encounter wind shear, I don't want someone flying who doesn't know how to recover.

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Eh, never fun. What happened?

Wow, that sucks. Sounds like the instructor needs a little lesson himself. Get a military pilot (just my cup of tea) to scare the piss out of him flippin' over, he won't let you try that again.

Speaking of the cross country, what happened there?

Turbulence will do that to you. Something I love about large airplanes, they take the turbulence and you never feel much of it.

Felt sorry for a guy I passed this morning though. We were climbing through 15,000 and gettin' slammed comin' out of DFW by some heavy turbulence (I would say moderate, and that's on a 767) and this turbocharged Cessna 210 passes under us and he contacted ATC and said he needed a new altitude, you could hear the pain in his voice, he must have been fighting with that thing for dear life.