Firstly may I suggest ignoring the sarcastic bar stewards here unable to provide a straight answer to a straight question.
My flight bag is stuffed with far too much stuff even for me, but as I mix instructing, test flying and long trips in typically 6-12 types per year, by any standard what's in my flight bag isn't what you want in yours.
For a USA based student pilot, which is what you appear to be, I'd say:-
- The bag itself: don't get sucked into buying some ludicrously overpriced specialist item from a pilot shop that just wants your money. A $10 synthetic canvas school bag will do fine.
- Headset: obviously a good one. There are many options, but a second hand pair of David Clarkes from eBay will do everything you need at this stage.
- UP TO DATE Local sectional chart
- Local airfields guide
- E6B flight computer and fx83 calculator, or equivalents (I'd label the FX83 the best readily available, and exam legal, scientific calculator. There are many flight computers - my personal favourite for little aeroplanes is the Pooleys CPR1-W, but that may not be readily available in the USA)
- Pad of PLOGs: you can buy these or do what I do and design your own and print them out. At this stage, probably easiest to buy, but discuss this with your instructor who might be perfectly happy for you to just use a notepad.
- If you wear them, spare glasses.
- Sunglasses
- Baseball cap (I find this REALLY useful, even more so than sunglasses)
- Spare pens
- Your preferred protractor / ruler combination. I know what I use, but I recommend talking to your instructor about what they'd like you to be using.
- Checklist for the aeroplane you're learning in. Again, talk to your instructor about this and use what they recommend or provide.
- If you are flying in one of the hotter and sunnier states, a bottle of water.
- Generally I find having a notepad in there useful, there's all sorts of things you might want to make notes about, for example during briefs and debriefs, reminders for stuff you need to prepare for the next lesson, learning points you want to think about between flights, the fueller's cellphone number...
- And a kneeboard. My personal preference is an A5 "trifold" kneeboard - the sort that is sold by all of the pilot shops, but there's a big element of personal preference here, and it might be worth borrowing a few to see what you like best.
(And yes, if there's any risk of night flying - which doesn't happen much where I live, torch and a couple of cylume sticks. Useful hint from one who has made that mistake, don't make notes in red pen for night flying - you can't see it if you have a red lensed torch)
Once qualified you may replace much of this with an iPad of course, but the learning environment hasn't really caught up with that yet. You'll certainly once qualified probably want to supplement your bag with some form of backup GPS (even if it's just an app on your phone) and if you do a lot of trips over remote areas a handheld backup radio and personal locator beacon (PLB) - all of which I also carry, but you don't need whilst you're learning.
Not so much an issue during my PPL, but when I did my CPL I found that with the constant high workload in the cockpit I always lost at least one pen and one ruler under the seat each flight, so carrying spares did me a lot of favours, then of course always remember to retrieve them after the flight !
Hope that helps a bit more than my learned colleagues' sarcasm !
Last edited by Genghis the Engineer; 5th Jul 2017 at 13:26.