BrightLine Bags, Inc. was founded in 2008 as a result of the surprising need to create a better Pilot Flight Bag.
As any student pilot or flight instructor or general aviation pilot can tell you, there are LOTS of items that have to be carried out to the aircraft for every flight. You know: headset, fuel tester, navigation charts and/or iPad, kneeboard, flashlights, checklists, sunglasses, logbook, pens, extra batteries. And then there are many important items like all the cords, cables, adapters, chargers, and batteries for the mobile electronics, as well as extra charts, hand-held radio, Leatherman-type multi-tool, extra pens & markers, reading glasses, and a place for really small stuff like coins, business cards (and your chapstick and ibuprofen), and other miscellaneous stuff. Not to mention the need to store your cell phone, wallet, car keys, and pocket stuff during the flight.
MoreClearly, every pilot needs to own a bag. Ideally, any pilot would want the smallest bag possible that would carry all this stuff, and they would want there to be a lot of different pockets that could organize everything. The bag should be compact, organized, and efficient.
Before BrightLine Bags, when pilots would go looking for a bag, it would seem like a simple thing to find a suitable bag because there are a hundred different pilot flight bags available everywhere. Every airport pilot shop, pilot magazine and pilot supply catalog/website is full of them.
But the reality was that in very short order, the surprise and disappointment would begin to set in. Pilots quickly discovered that all the bags that were available were either [1] too small (the charts wouldn’t fit) and there were only one or two pockets, or [2] if the bag was a good size, there still weren’t enough pockets, or [3] the bag was just plain too big (and STILL didn’t have enough pockets).
Not only were pilots unable to find the bag they were hoping for, but often they couldn’t even finding anything CLOSE. Almost without exception, every bag available was going to cause the pilot to dump their stuff into one or two main compartments and then go rooting through all that stuff every time they needed to find something. (These pilots often not-so-affectionately referred to these bags as their “black hole” because things just seem to disappear into it.)
And no matter how far and wide one might search for a suitable bag, alas, those searches were always fruitless. Pilots everywhere ended up having to make do with some random bag that sort-of worked. There was no choice but to endure the annoying battle with their semi-functional bag every time they flew.
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