Brightline Flight Bag
After months of obsessing I finally purchased the pricey Brightline Flight Bag last month and said “goodbye” to my vastly inferior messenger-style bag. Why am I so excited about a bag of all things? NERD ALERT: Organization rocks!
On every flight, I am walking from the terminal to the aircraft with a briefcase-style bag containing the aircrafts documents, my flight bag, and a separate bag for my headset (not to mention passenger headsets). Annoying to say the least. To add to my inconvenience, my flight bag only had 3 pockets. One for pens and two giant ones for everything else. When you are carrying a fully loaded flight bag (including a fuel tester, screw driver, ruler, flight computer, log book, maps, CFS (thick book), airplane manuel, pens, calculator, batteries, Spot Connect, flight timer, CO2 detector, sunglasses, license, flashlight, GPS, etc…) it becomes a huge hassle to find anything you want, especially while flying the plane. Luckily, this bag has a separate colour-coded pocket for absolutely everything, including a spot for two headsets, all while being less bulky than my last flight bag. To top it off, it actually zips in half into two bags just in case you don’t need everything in the cockpit. Of course they recreated the essential pockets so you have it on both halves.
The folks who designed this were definitely frustrated pilots and simply wanted to solve their problems once and for all. Check out the interior below or a demonstration video here.
Spot Connect & Adventures
This has to be one of the coolest gadgets I have ever bought.
Spot Connect is a device that pairs with your smartphone and connects you to a global satellite network that lets you send text/email/facebook/twitter messages and GPS coordinates from virtually anywhere on the planet. And in the case of a critical emergency, send an SOS message requesting emergency assistance.
A really neat feature, especially for pilots or travellers, is GPS tracking. Your coordinates and the time are updated on a public or private password protected Google map every 10 minutes. Friends and Family can track you in real time and when you are done your adventure you can edit the map to add pictures/descriptions to each of your way points. This is an especially useful tool for pilots, but is obviously something that can be used by everyone.
If you are a pilot or an avid world traveller, the added safety and awesomeness of this gadget is hard to pass up. During the course of this year (mostly the spring/summer/fall) I am going to be posting adventure maps from trips I fly onto this blog.
Fly Dan Air 