If anyone told me two months ago I’d get excited about a flight bag for pilots and blog about it I would have laughed. The reason is simple. I spent 25 years working in high tech and flight bags always seemed mundane and uninteresting compared to other pilot accessories. For years I simply used gym bags or, most recently, my Lightspeed Zulu headset case as a mini flight bag.
That all changed with my discovery of the BrightLine flight bag. For pilots, this is clearly the most well thought out design for a flight bag. It absolutely reeks with creativity and innovation. And I still can’t believe I’m using those words to describe a flight bag. Apparently Aviation Consumer magazine named BrightLine its Flight Bag of the Year, so I’m not the only one taken by it.
The bag has seemingly dozens of…
zipper pockets, all of them with color-coded zipper pulls so you can instantly open the right pocket, assuming of course that you remember the colors. It has room for two headsets, but if you only want to carry one, half of the bag can be unzipped and left at home. So you could conceivable divide up the two half bags into one for IFR and one for VFR, or one for the stuff you need when flying at night versus in the day. I’m still trying to figure out if I want to dedicate one half for when I fly my seaplane and the other half for general flying. But the point is that you have options and lots of them.
There are separate pockets for your sunglasses, a cell phone, a VFR radio, flashlights, a Leatherman tool, charts and more. Coincidentally, the charts pocket is the perfect size for my Apple iPad, which I generally carry instead of paper charts.
You might think that, to carry two headsets and all of the other gear, the BrightLine bag would be gargantuan, but it’s not. It’s taller than it is wide or deep, so it’s easy to reach the handle even if you have it on the cabin floor behind the front seats. It measures 13 inches tall x 10 inches wide and 9 inches deep.
My favorite part of the bag is the demo video. President Ross Bishop designed the BrightLine flight bag for pilots and gives a fantastic demonstration of its capabilities. Like a magician pulling an unending series of scarves from a hat, Ross pulls innumerable zippers revealing the many pilot accessories neatly hidden in the bag while showing the logic with which everything is organized. Even if you think you have no interest in a new bag, I recommend the video
BrightLine gets my “Two Thumbs Up” for begin a highly innovative and well thought out product in what I’d always thought was an uninteresting product category. Try it. I think you’ll like it too. Believe me, you’ll never go back to using a gym bag again.
I want one!!