‘It’s not weird’: The people who love to stare at in-flight maps

“Flight pathers” were picking maps over movies before it was trendy on TikTok.

Nicole Sunderland doesn’t have to ponder the in-flight entertainment options when she looks at the screen on the plane seat in front of her.

She’ll be watching the map, thank you very much.

“I’ll fly to Qatar for 14 hours, and that map will be on the entire time,” said Sunderland, 41, a content creator and consultant who splits time between the D.C. area and Phoenix. Flight attendants don’t always understand: “Sometimes they’ll reach in and be like, ‘Do you want us to turn it off?’ And I’m like, ‘No, no. Leave it on.’”

She’s part of a robust group of fliers who keep their eyes on the plane’s progress. The practice got a blast of publicity last year amid a social media trend that featured travelers — mostly men — staring straight ahead at maps or blank space during long trips to prove … something.

“You just gonna sit there staring at the back of the seat?” Elaine Benes asks her on-again, off-again boyfriend David Puddy in an oft-referenced episode of “Seinfeld.” “Yeah,” he replies, staring blankly ahead with a satisfied look on his face.

The name of the trend is too crude to spell out in a family newspaper (think: uncooked canine). In some cases, according to news articles that questioned whether participants were “heroic or foolish,” travelers shunned drinking water and even bathroom visits. Some commenters hailed the “ultimate dopamine detox,” while fliers bragged about reaching a new personal best.

Whether it was a true endurance challenge or a merely a bit, the internet had a blast with it.

“The mind is capable of amazing things,” the text over one apparently tongue-in-cheek TikTok says. “My mind knows no limits. I am operating in a different spiritual realm.”

‘Raving map fans’

Moving in-flight maps, which first appeared on passenger planes in the 1980s, boast broad appeal beyond the ephemeral trend.

According to FlightPath3D, an in-flight map provider for more than 90 airlines, about 68 percent of passengers open the map on seat-back screens and 20 percent view only the map. Delta Air Lines has said the flight map is the top piece of content, with 45 percent of passengers engaging with it during flights.

Duncan Jackson, president of FlightPath3D, has a name for the fans: flight pathers. He said there are now options built in to explore animated previews of destinations, global route maps and animal-filled kids’ maps. Last year, he said, 400 million passengers used the product.

“There’s comfort in it. For some, it’s almost meditative,” he said. “They just love to see where they are, how long’s left, watch the progress of the aircraft across the flight plan. There are just raving map fans.”

Sunderland’s interest — obsession even — in pinpointing her location in the sky dates to a turbulent flight between the Bahamas and Florida in 2017. Now, she keeps her eye on the elevation to see how much the plane has dropped in shaky air. She will try to sleep on an overnight, pick up a book and may occasionally watch her comfort movie, “Crazy Rich Asians.” But her eyes return to the map whenever there are bumps.

“All my travel companions make fun of me, every single one,” she said.

She once took a long flight with a friend who watched four or five Harry Potter movies in a row.

“My anxious self … I was watching the speed, the elevation, the flight path,” Sunderland said.

Cheaper than buying WiFi

Manu Seminara said watching maps on a plane is “almost like a hobby.” The London resident works for a marketing agency and posts travel content on TikTok, where she shared a video of people around her watching movies and TV shows on a plane while she adjusted her view of the map.

“I try to put on a movie and I’m like, ‘This is more interesting,’” she said. She loves seeing the elevation and what city she’s flying over.

Seminara said she felt “seen, honestly,” when flight map fixations went viral last year.

“I was doing this, and it’s not weird, because clearly people are doing it,” she said. “They’re just coming out now.”

Nick Kosir, who is known as the Dancing Weatherman on Fox Weather, was talking to his manager about a recent flight a couple of years back.

“It was awesome: I just sat there, stared straight ahead and didn’t do anything for five hours,” said Kosir, who lives in New York. “He goes, ‘Dude, that’s a serial killer trait.’”

When the trend started to go viral the following year, he sent an example to his manager and said, “I found my people.”

Kosir made his own video showing himself watching the flight map. He said he spends so much time online every day that he welcomes an escape. Sometimes he just tries to focus on creative ideas or deep thinking before the plane lands. On the flight about which he posted on TikTok, he wrote that he counted to 1 million twice.

“On a plane, I’m too cheap to buy the WiFi so it actually is peaceful in my mind and I truly enjoy that,” he said. “If there’s nothing in front of me, I just stare blankly into the cosmos.”

But if the flight map is available, he’s a fan.

“I weirdly like watching the flight tracker just because it’s cool to me; it’s cool to see how fast the plane is going, it’s cool to see what state you’re over,” he said. “Something about it is oddly comforting.”