Everybody has their very own tips for staving off boredom on a long-haul flight. Some individuals load up on podcast episodes, others energy by means of the out there in-flight leisure. However nobody merely sits, staring silently on the real-time flight map on the display screen in entrance of them, for the whole thing of a visit. Proper? Flawed. A small group of hardy males—the gender that introduced you frat hazing and Logan Paul—at the moment are doing precisely that, and for a wide range of surprisingly stable causes.
A 26-year-old Londoner named West (who requested to make use of solely his first title) went viral in Might when he posted about his resolution to forgo any leisure and move a seven-hour journey watching the flight map. “Anybody else bareback flights?” he requested within the caption.
The idea—referred to in a vivid and maybe unlucky parlance as “rawdogging,” “flying uncooked,” and “bareback”—resonated with many within the feedback on West’s TikTok web page, @WestWasHere. “Yup, from London to Miami this week…pure bareback no meals or water,” one wrote. “I swear barebacking flights make it go faster,” one other added.
“I’ve received DMs on Instagram like, ‘Bro, you want to educate us find out how to bareback flights,’” West tells GQ.
“I’m a nervous flier and usually can’t give attention to something on a airplane—films, TV reveals, books, articles, no matter—with any success,” says Luke Winkie, a 33-year-old workers author at Slate, who has used the flight map as his solely in-flight leisure for years. “For some purpose I do not like processing new data once I’m within the air. I wish to stick with issues which are predictable and secure.”
For West, who has since posted a number of movies from his uncooked flights (together with his longest, a 21-hour slog from London to Perth, Australia), the follow merely resulted from how a lot he has to journey for his work within the music business. “I received sick of watching the identical films,” he says. West likens flying uncooked to meditation. “Visually, you might be sort of impaired. You solely get to have a look at the seat in entrance of you, to your proper or left should you’re on the window. All you hear is that drumming sound of the engine. It is simply white noise.”
However West and others have additionally come to see rawdogging flights as a sort of problem, just like the Powerful Mudder or No Nut November, the objective being to see how absolutely individuals can deprive themselves of creature comforts, as much as and together with free snack and drinks and even rest room visits. A real rawdogger takes no indulgences.
West says that the ladies who’ve commented on his movies are normally doing so to specific shock. Taking flights uncooked appears to be a “masculine factor,” he says. “Every part’s about wanting cool. Most guys embrace it as a joke or like, ‘We’re so laborious. David Goggins has nothing on us.’”
Winkie agrees. “I do not assume males have the identical ‘deal with tradition’ that girls do, which is frankly a disgrace,” he says. “A protracted flight, for ladies, is the right venue to prepare a whole itinerary of treats, and I do assume males are typically extra stoic and peculiar in regards to the areas during which they permit themselves to obtain pleasure.”
Nonetheless, West says {that a} current journey from London from Bali (20 hours) taught him that there are advantages to rawdogging past its meditative nature. His greatest concepts, he says, have come from the time spent locked into the flight map, simply considering. “I am there like, Oh, we’re flying over Afghanistan. Oh, we’re going at 36,000 toes as an alternative of 37,” he says. “Or like, Oh, I feel that is a good suggestion as a brand new sequence on my TikTok.” The expertise left him refreshed. “Once I noticed my mother [upon landing], she was like, ‘You will have a lot vitality,’” he remembers. “And I am like, I really feel effective. I really feel recharged. I really feel like I have been capable of have time to myself.”
The final profit stands out as the most important: Everybody else leaves you alone. West remembers how a person who was seated subsequent to him in a center aisle opted to squeeze previous two individuals on his different aspect quite than disturb West. “He will need to have been like, ‘I don’t wish to hassle him proper now,’” West says with amusing. “‘He is locked into this altitude.’”
