I love flight bags. They're one of the few things we use as pilots that lend us some flair of individuality. Cyclists have their faux sponsor gear with so many logos they look like they just stepped off the Tour de France. Horse people have their saddles and jodhpurs; dancers have their shoes; chefs have their knives and secret spices. However, between our "Wilco-this" and "Niner-that," we're just disembodied voices in the firmament, little specks flying above people's heads with nothing more than an annoying engine to mark our place. Aside from headsets that nobody sees, what distinguishes each of our aviating "styles?" Only our flight bag accomplishes that. Flight bags say who we are as pilots. A woman who steps off the wing of her Cirrus with a ballistic-nylon flight bag sporting 73 color-coded pockets and a 600-lumen LED flashlight shows she's organized, into technology and probably runs a business or two. The pilot hurriedly feeding quarters into the vending machine with a frayed trade show-giveaway backpack sprouting a tangle of headset cords, lots of pens and wrinkled charts conveys something, too. Each bag says a lot about its carrier.
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