Flying Airplanes | Airplane Exhibits

Before the Flight Bag: The Black Powder Possibles Bag

September 8, 2026September 15, 2026
by Flying Airplanes

Walk through the maintenance side of any good aviation museum and you will find a glass case full of tool rolls, spanner sets and canvas kit bags. Every serious flying machine has always come with a companion object: the bag that holds everything needed to keep it running when there is nobody around to help. Long before anyone strapped a flight bag into a cockpit, American frontiersmen were carrying the same idea over one shoulder. They called it a possibles bag.

What It Was For

A muzzleloading rifle is not a self-contained machine. It is a system, and the shooter is the loading mechanism. Powder, patch, ball and ignition all arrive separately, in the right order, by hand. A misfire in the field is not a jam to be cleared, it is a maintenance job, and the parts have to be on you when it happens.

So the bag carried everything: measured powder, a horn to refill from, cast lead balls, greased patches, flints or percussion caps, a vent pick, a ball puller, a short starter, a patch knife and a screwdriver that fitted the lock. Nothing decorative, nothing spare.

Everything, Carried on the Operator

That is the part worth pausing on, because it is exactly the logic of an aircraft ground kit. You are a long way from a workshop, the machine will need attention, and the only spares that exist are the ones you brought. The design constraint is identical whether you are on a ridge in 1820 or a grass strip in 1930: small, light, ordered, and reachable without looking.

Original bags reflect it. They are modest in size, flat against the body so they do not swing when you walk, and divided inside so a hand can find the right thing by feel. Reproductions built to the old patterns keep those proportions. If you want to see how little has really changed, browse a range of black powder possibles bag designs and note how many are still laid out the way they were two centuries ago.

Watch: Possibles and Shooting Bags and What I Carry In Them (YouTube)

Why Museums Keep Them

An original bag tells you more about how people actually lived than the rifle hanging above it does. The rifle is the headline. The bag is the operating manual, written in wear patterns, in what got carried and what got left behind, in which pocket is worn through first.

Aviation collections have the same quiet hierarchy. The airframe draws the crowd; the ground equipment beside it explains how anyone kept the thing airworthy. Curators know which one answers more questions.

Old Kit, Same Problem

We have not stopped building these. A modern pilot’s bag holds a headset, charts, a torch and a spare battery. A tool roll in a restoration hangar holds the specific handful of things that machine needs. Same object, different century. The possibles bag is simply the oldest version still in use, and it is worth a second look the next time you pass one in a case.

From Bird Wings to Wing Bones: A Curious Piece…

August 4, 2026August 4, 2026
by Flying Airplanes

Long before the Wright brothers ever left the ground, would-be aviators studied the one thing that already had flight solved: birds. They were fascinated by wings — the geometry, the lightness, the hollow bones nature had engineered for lift. It is a short and surprising hop from that obsession to a small, old-fashioned object that honors those same bird wings from a completely different angle: the wingbone turkey call, built from the actual wing bones of a wild turkey.

A Call Made from Flight Itself

The wingbone call is one of the oldest game calls in North America, used for centuries before any factory made a plastic one. It is assembled from three hollow bones of a turkey’s wing, cut, cleaned, and fitted together into a slender trumpet. Those same air-filled, lightweight bones that help a bird get airborne turn out to be near-perfect little resonators — a quiet reminder that good design in nature rarely does just one job.

How a Wingbone Call Works

Unlike a call you blow into, a wingbone works on suction. The user kisses the small end and draws air in sharp little pulls, almost like a smooch, to produce the yelps, clucks, and soft purrs of a hen. It takes practice and a good ear, which is part of the charm — there is real craft in coaxing a lifelike voice out of three bones and a puff of air. Handmade wingbone turkey calls carry that tradition forward, each one a little different from the next.

Watch: how to use a wingbone turkey call

Watch: Wingbone Turkey Call — How to Squeal, Cluck and Softly Yelp (YouTube)

Old Technology That Still Works

There is a nice parallel here for anyone who loves aviation history. The earliest flying machines looked primitive next to a modern jet, yet the principles they proved still hold the sky up today. The wingbone call is the same kind of artifact: simple, time-tested, and still perfectly effective centuries on. Progress rarely means throwing out what already works — it means understanding it well enough to build on it.

Two Kinds of Flight

It is a pleasing thought that the same wings which inspired our first airplanes also gave us one of hunting’s most enduring instruments. One took us into the sky; the other lets us speak, however briefly, in the language of the birds. Both begin with the same humble marvel — a wing — and both reward the curious person willing to study how it works.

Author: Flying Airplanes