February 2012
I will start right off and tell you that I really like the Pilot Bag manufactured by BrightLine Bags. The bag is built well, performs as advertised, and after several months of use seems likely to last a long time. I would not hesitate to recommend it to a friend.
It has already passed, with flying colors, my personal test of zippered devices of any sort—the “Is the zipper any damn good?” test—which I routinely apply to anything I think about using, whether to hold laptops or iPads, safeguard my fly rods, rifles, or shotguns and especially to things designed to keep me warm and dry (like the many jackets that routinely fail).
BrightLine’s bag has real zippers with absolutely no wimpishness about them. They work, they don’t stick and they have about 20 teeth to the inch. (OK, so I once worked for a Garment District magnate who specialized in ladies’ raincoats and I know from zippers, as they say in the old country.)
It is obvious that much thought went into designing this bag, and the proliferation of pockets makes it easy to organize and to locate things. It holds everything I could possibly want to take back and forth to my hangar, and if I was still renting an airplane it would hold all the gear I could imagine wanting to fly with.
I don’t write many product reviews. The UPS driver does not know my name and manufacturers have not been inundating me with packages and pleas for coverage of their goods. In addition, I need to point out that I have always been skeptical of marketing and advertising claims that use adulatory adjectives—“best,” “most clever,” “biggest”—so much so that I tell my journalism students that they risk serious grade erosion if they let such hyperbole enter their work.
Furthermore, since I own an airplane and keep pretty much most of my gear except for portable electronics at my hangar or in the plane, I am probably not the target market for flight bags.
So when Jennifer Dellenbusch, the publisher of this magazine, sent me the BrightLine Pilot Flight Bag and suggested I use it for a while and then write a product review, I was resistant.
But not any longer. I have now joined Aviation Consumer, which named the BrightLine bag as the “Top Flight Bag” in its Gear of the Year issue, and hundreds of BrightLine customers who love the thing, if the reviews all over the Internet are any indication.
Its popularity is apparently a viral phenomenon, according to its manufacturer, and not the product of a fancy marketing plan designed to make you feel good about buying the bag, which carries a $129 price tag and is available from BrightLine’s website as well as via Pilotshop.com and other pilot supply houses.
The backstory about BrightLine is on its website, but I wanted more background, so I called the company. In one of those circumstances that only seem to happen in the world of General Aviation, Ross Bishop, the company’s founder and inventor of the bag himself, answered the phone. The conversation began with him telling me that he had stopped into the office even though it was Saturday “because there was just stuff to do.”
Bishop, an engineer with a degree from the University of Colorado, told me he always wanted to fly, specifically helicopters. He ended up studying engineering instead because of the glut of copter pilots in the market caused by the Vietnam War years. But around 2004, when he was in his early 40s, through a series of lucky circumstances he was offered a helicopter pilot job. “They were looking for good people, not so much for experience,” Bishop said, and off he went to Nevada for helicopter flight training school that took him all way through his commercial and CFI tickets.
It was while he was a student pilot that his Pilot Bag was born. “As a brand-new student, I had my headset and all my charts and stuff—and of course, my sunglasses—and I wanted a small bag to cart it all around in,” Bishop said. But when he went looking he couldn’t find exactly what he wanted.
With his engineering background in product design and finite element analysis, and having experience teaching 3-D computer assisted design drawing, it was only natural that he started designing the bag he wanted for himself.
“That’s how I spent my weekends, building 3-D bag models. I made it to hold everything I could think of, as small as I could make it,” Bishop said. And still sounding somewhat surprised, he added, “My buddies at school liked it!”
His first prototype bag cost him $400 to make. “But I got the bag I wanted,” he said.
Bishop, who said he never wrote a business plan, said he has been amazed and gratified by the bag’s success. He tells the story of his first real “marketing” effort, a helicopter aviation show in the Bay Area in 2007. He rented a 10×10 space, built a booth himself and made some banners, and paid some of his flight students to work the booth because he was flying in the show.
The product had never been shown to the public, and as he prepared for the airshow he received a text from one of the students at the booth. “It said they had sold a bag. Then 10 minutes later another text came and they had sold two more bags. At the end of six hours, 24 bags had been sold,” he recalled.
Several shows later and he was in the flight bag business. “It has been entirely viral. It started with a few pilot shops in the Bay Area and then dealers started carrying them,” Bishop said.
Today, BrightLine Bags has 250 dealers around the world.
“We try to respect the customer and listen, and in the same way I started out and got the bag I wanted, since then it has continued the bag the customer wants,” Bishop said.
I asked him what he meant, and he said that the best improvements in the bag design since its inception have come from users. “The color-coding on the zipper pulls came from a customer, as did the little wings on the pockets that hold things in,” he said.
The suggestions from users keep coming—so much so, Bishop hinted, that he might have to come out with new products.
If he does, I’d probably buy them.
David Hipschman is a pilot and aircraft owner. He writes the Heading Bug column here, edits the National Association of Flight Instructors’ Mentor magazine, and teaches journalism at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Fla. Send questions or comments to editor@www.piperflyer.com.
Resources
BrightLine Bags, Inc.
1537 4th Street – 233
San Rafael, CA 94901
(415) 721-7825
info@brightlinebags.com
www.brightline-bags.com
