Everyday Carry

Flight Crew must have certain equipment on them at all times. This equipment can vary from country to country, but in the U.S. the FAA mandates certain equipment (like a watch, certain manuals, and flashlight), and your employer could mandate company specific articles like a tablet and credit card reader.

Watches:

Watches are a deeply personal article for many people. To some, they are an important fashion piece, and to others merely a tool they are told they have to wear. Afterall, our phones tell us what time it is right? My husband is a ‘watch guy’, and he owns expensive watches but rarely travels with them because of security, or environmental concerns. He also owns less expensive watches because they simply delight him. We’ll leave luxury watches out of our recommendations because of cost and not wanted to attract too much attention at work. Regardless of what watch you decide to wear on duty or for leisure, you should consider this:

Wearability – It must be comfortable
Durability – Because you’re going to be hitting it on things
Accuracy – what good is an inaccurate watch?
Useability – do you want a simple timekeeper or do you need other features like alarms or GPS?

Higher-end watches from Apple: We love these because of all the cool features, especially if you are an iPhone user.

Many more option exist if you want to shop around the Apple Store on Amazon.

Higher-end watches for Android users: We love these for all the features, including health monitoring.

Many more option exist if you want to shop around on Amazon.

Solid choices:

We love Casio G-Shock watches for their legendary toughness and readability. These models below are some of the more refined choices.

As we said above, we have purposely narrowed our recommendation to affordable, useful, and durable watches. But shop around on Amazon for more great choices. This list was just to give you some ideas.

Flashlights:

As required equipment, you need a flashlight that is rechargeable, so you don’t have to worry about a dead battery. You don’t want to be caught with a dead flashlight!

Different situations may require different approaches to illumination. While most cabin crew are required to ‘have a flashlight’, you might want to have several for different situations. Here are our favorite choices for those situations.

Tactical Flashlights:

We suggest these for your required flashlight. They are very BRIGHT, rechargeable and are also useful self-defense situations (blinding or disorienting an attacker).

Ambient Lighting:

Sometimes, a standard handheld flashlight is not what you need. You might need to light an entire area such as a galley or cockpit, or a hotel room if power is lost. These lights can be handy to clip to your clothing or attach to something to light up an entire area.

Headlights:

We use headlights all the time. There are a lot handier than you’d think, particularly if you’re on an overnight and find yourself out after dark.

Lighted Pens:

Everyone likes a fancy pen, until you lose it. We won’t recommend any fancy or expensive pens here. But an illuminated pen is a game changer. If the cockpit or cabin is dark and you need to take notes (like drink orders), these are amazing. But buy a bunch – you’ll lose them and they’ll get stolen!

Organizers:

Flight crews have a lot of things to lug around, a lot of equipment to recharge, and they to get to these things quickly. These are a few handy things we use.