• English Site
• > Zeitgeist

Prepare for Take Off

German Travel Group to Offer Nude Flights

An online travel Web site in eastern Germany will offer a clothes-optional flight to a lucky few this summer. Given the German love for all things naked, chances are it's already sold out.

If you know Germany, you know that Germans really love to be naked, stripping off just about anywhere and any time. Now a new travel service is to indulge this German love for disrobing -- by letting them do it in the air.

An online travel agency, OssiUrlaub.de, has announced that it will offer a nude chartered flight between the eastern German town of Erfurt and the Baltic Sea island resort of Usedom.

The flight, planned for July 5 and returning a week later, will be able to hold 55 passengers, and tickets will cost €499 ($735).

"I wish I could say we thought of it ourselves but the idea came from a customer," managing director Enrico Hess told Reuters. "It's an unusual gap in the market."

FKK, or "free body culture" -- i.e., disrobed living -- has been popular in Germany for some time. Although the Nazis banned the practice, it roared back into favor after World War II, particularly in former Communist East Germany.

The company's name itself refers to an "Ossi," the slang German term for a former East German.

There won't be total nudity on board. For safety reasons, the flight's crew will remain clad for the duration of the flight. And passengers, too, will be forced to wear clothes before boarding and leaving the plane.

Nor is the flight intended to be a mile-high club en masse. "I don't want people to get the wrong idea," Hess told Reuters. "It's not that we're starting a swinger club in mid-air or something like that."

"We're a perfectly normal holiday company," he added.

jtw/reuters