“I’ve got DMs on Instagram like, ‘Bro, you need to teach us how to bareback flights,’” says a pioneer of the swashbuckling trend.
By Kate Lindsay
Everyone has their own tricks for staving off boredom on a long-haul flight. Some people load up on podcast episodes, others power through the available in-flight entertainment. But no one simply sits, staring silently at the real-time flight map on the screen in front of them, for the entirety of a trip. Right? Wrong. A small group of hardy men—the gender that brought you frat hazing and Logan Paul—are now doing exactly that, and for a variety of surprisingly solid reasons.
A 26-year-old Londoner named West (who asked to use only his first name) went viral in May when he posted about his decision to forgo any entertainment and pass a seven-hour trip watching the flight map. “Anyone else bareback flights?” he asked in the caption.
The concept—referred to in a vivid and perhaps unfortunate parlance as “rawdogging,” “flying raw,” and “bareback”—resonated with many in the comments on West’s TikTok page, @WestWasHere. “Yup, from London to Miami this week…pure bareback no food or water,” one wrote. “I swear barebacking flights make it go quicker,” another added.
“I’ve got DMs on Instagram like, ‘Bro, you need to teach us how to bareback flights,’” West tells GQ.
“I am a nervous flier and generally cannot focus on anything on a plane—movies, TV shows, books, articles, whatever—with any success,” says Luke Winkie, a 33-year-old staff writer at Slate, who has used the flight map as his only in-flight entertainment for years. “For some reason I don’t like processing new information when I’m in the air. I want to stick to things that are predictable and safe.”
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