Air bag
I get on a fair number of airplanes, unfortunately, because the whole point of doing so is not the flying but the getting there. No sane person likes the act of flying. No matter how pampered you are, it’s still turbulent up in business class, you’re still weirdly fatigued the instant the bird takes off, and you really just want to count the seconds until you get there and do something.
And so you need a very, very small amount of things to stay sane on the plane. In practice, this includes staying moisturized, hydrated, entertained, and – if you’re one of those fortunate souls who can – sleeping. You are killing time while fighting the bird’s attempt to transform you into a desiccated husk.
The generic pack list
- Water bottle
- iPad or laptop
- Charger/battery + cable
- Lip balm
- Hand salve
- Kleenex
- Headphones/AirPods
- Eyeshade
- Mask
- Hand sanitizer
- Notebook + pen
Everything but the first two items should go into one bag, so you can grab everything you need quickly from your backpack and throw it in the always-rapidly-dwindling overhead space. This also prevents you from needing an additional item under the seat, which lets you stretch out if needed.
Air bag as category
I’m saying all of this not because I think it’s novel or surprising, but because there is really no specific bag that is custom tailored for such a purpose. Do you get a second miniature dopp kit? Throw everything loose in a Topo pouch or Klein Tools bag and be done with it? Theoretically this should work for you both on the plane and on trip, so you should be able to throw it in a daypack and be able to consult it quickly & easily. (This list looks very similar to what I carry every day when puttering around the city, probably by design.)
Fam, we can do better than a flat pouch. You want some organization to the whole affair. You want the one thing that will hold all of this snugly, sproing it all out like a swiss army knife at a moment’s notice, and make sense, both on the plane and on the ground.
We have spoken of CAP-2 and then CAP-1, which are two objects so radically different that they share only three letters in common, but they both kind of work as air bags. My CAP-2 worked fine as an air bag, I guess, but it had so much unnecessary padding that I ended up eBaying it. Turns out the green version is sold out everywhere, and I owned one of those, so I turned a significant profit and replaced it with a CAP-1, which works great as an air bag but does not have much leeway for new objects.
The CAP-1 gets close to an ideal air bag state for me. It is overengineered within an inch of its life. It works equally well in a seat back or a daypack. It has enough sleeves & secret pockets to facilitate the right pack load. If your notebook is more of a Field Notes than my beloved Leuchtturm, you’ll probably fare even better.
There is still no real air bag for everyone. How do you even describe this, let alone specify it? It is agender, with widely variant use cases. Lip balm can be a tube, a stick, or a tiny pot. Batteries vary in size, as do cables. I haven’t even talked about gender challenges yet. But the case is there, and it’s a problem ripe for solving. You’re welcome for the free idea.