A pilot’s flight bag is the one carry-on you wouldn’t want gate-checked. Here’s why.

On a recent trip to the airport, as I struggled to remove my flight bag from the trunk of my car, it struck me how heavy and awkward it was to handle. I have one of those carry-on black bags you often see pilots dragging through airports. Have you ever wondered what’s in those bags, and why we lug them around? Let’s take an inventory and discuss why its contents are so essential.

My flight bag weighs about 40 pounds: It’s packed with four flight manuals, 50 charts and many other flight-related items. Each manual is about the thickness of a large metropolitan white pages, printed on similar ultra-thin paper. Every dense page of these tomes is covered with enough small print, graphs and diagrams to keep anyone busy for hours. It’s a mystery that I haven’t seriously injured my back hoisting that bag into the cockpit—but the information it contains is critical to the smooth operation of the flight. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to the “electronic flight bag” that will soon replace all of the manuals we currently carry.

The most important publication in the bag is the aircraft Flight Manual—in my case, for the Boeing 747-400. This book resembles the owner’s manual for your car, only much more in-depth (and about 700 pages longer).

It covers every imaginable system on the aircraft, including all the limits and specifications of the plane’s components. It also contains step-by-step instructions on how to handle 100-plus in-flight emergencies. When we have a question or a problem with an aircraft system, we consult this manual first.

The bag also contains a Flight Operations Manual as comprehensive as the Flight Manual. This book deals primarily with how to conduct flight operations activities and maintain compliance with Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs), the Aeronautical Information Manual, FAA-approved operations specifications, and company policies and procedures.

Next we have the airport departure, approach and en route navigational charts. Due to the domestic and international reach of the plane I fly, this is the thickest manual I carry. In the event that we have an en route emergency and must divert the plane, these charts and diagrams are critical in ensuring our safe arrival at the intermediate stop. While I have never needed to use 99 percent of the en route and approach charts I carry, I know they would be worth their weight in gold during a crisis situation.

As you might imagine, these publications require continual updates and maintenance. The airport approach charts and Flight Operations Manual must be manually updated every two weeks. The Flight Manual is updated whenever there’s a change to an aircraft system or the way in which an emergency procedure should be managed—usually once a month or less. Updating the binders takes a great deal of time and energy, since each new or revised page must be added by hand.

If you asked a group of pilots what they like the least about their job, most would probably say manual revisions. But things are looking up—the new electronic flight bags take only seconds to revise through an Internet connection. A laptop mounted in the plane also offers many other advantages over paper, and it will soon become the norm. Many newer aircraft will have the electronic flight bag built into the avionics of the airframe itself, eliminating the need for 90 percent of the contents of the regular flight bag.

In my opinion, this change can’t come soon enough. Other weary pilots and I eagerly anticipate the day we get to lighten our carry-on load and give our backs a break.
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CHRIS COOKE is a pilot with a major domestic carrier. He can be reached at editor@executivetravelmag.com.