Chris Martin intrigued onlookers on Monday when he kissed the tarmac at Sydney Airport before boarding a private jet to Auckland, New Zealand.
Moments before he stepped onto the plane, the Coldplay frontman got down on his hands and knees and pressed his lips to the ground.
He was previously spotted following the same routine when he landed in Malaysia last year ahead of his concert there, and in Indonesia during his previous tour.
Martin hasn’t confirmed why he performs the quirky act, but the ritual may stem from a brush with death he had early on in his music career.
The rock star, who formed Coldplay in London in 1997, revealed he almost died in 2005 when his plane hit a dust storm flying over West Africa.
He was on his way to Ghana with Oxfam when disaster struck just as the flight was coming into Tamale Airport.
“It was so terrifying, the plane was all over the place,” Martin told Sun newspaper at the time.
“Once a year, for a week, all this dust blows over from the Sahara Desert. You could not see a thing. I couldn’t see the ground and, as it turns out, nor could the pilot.”
At the time, Chris was married to actor Gwyneth Paltrow, with whom he shares daughter Apple, now 20, and son Moses, 18.
During the ordeal, Chris said he was thinking about his daughter, who was then just a year old.
“I thought, ‘My daughter will have to get a stepdad.'”
