Rawdogging a flight is the latest holiday trend you need to try

Imagine the scenario: you’ve boarded an eight-hour flight to New York and buckled up to discover the in-flight entertainment is bust, you’ve forgotten to pre-order a veggie meal and your phone/laptop/tablet has died. Worse still, it’s a morning departure, so sleeping through the entire journey isn’t even an option.

For most travellers, the idea of spending a lengthy stretch in the air with nothing to do would be recourse for calling mayday. But a new breed of frequent flyers is actively choosing to abstain from any kind of interaction on flights. Known as ‘raw-dogging’, the trend is sweeping through social media faster than a Concorde.

Switch off, zone out

Despite the easily mistakable sexual connotations (no, this isn’t a perverse act of initiation into the mile-high club), there’s nothing remotely stimulating about the activity. Quite the opposite, in fact. Akin to a Buddhist monk slipping into Zen-like meditation, quiet euphoria is achieved by switching off, zoning out and staring into space.

Weirdly, the bizarre behaviour has been linked mainly to men. According to GQ, a 26-year-old Londoner named West kickstarted the idea with a viral post bragging about seven hours of fly-time spent gazing at a seat screen map.

“Anyone else bareback flights?” he wrote. Responding to ‘how to’ calls from intrigued followers, he’s since posted more educational ‘raw flight’ videos, including an empty 21-hour stint from London to Perth.

Ultimate challenge

Some converts claim raw-dogging helps them deal with a fear of flying, others see airborne abstinence as some sort of challenge, channelling the martyrdom of a priest about to enter a religious order.

“In-flight entertainment? You can watch that stuff anywhere. You know what you