A red-eye is a flight that travels through the night. You board late, arrive early, and sleep almost not at all.
The name comes from what passengers look like on arrival. The classic route is a long east-west crossing where the time difference means landing at dawn. It is chiefly American in origin and now understood everywhere. There is a completely separate photographic sense, since red-eye is the effect of a flash reflecting off the back of the eye, and every camera has a setting to reduce it.
The noun is derived from red + eye; sense 2.3 (“strong but poor-quality whiskey”) and sense 3 (“overnight airplane flight”) are probably so named because they may cause people to develop bloodshot eyes. The verb is derived from the noun.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, Airport & Flying
First appears in chapter 25 of A Man Called Ove.
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