Flying with Fountain Pens Pt. II

This is a follow up to a post I did when I first started the blog. Even though I know that I can fly and use a fountain pen with no issues, I hadn’t brought a fountain pen to work since starting my new job and there are a couple of reasons why I was hesitant to.  The first is because I wasn’t sure how well the pen, and mainly the ink would handle the temperature changes I see on a regular basis. The temperature changes I’m talking about are more of a concern during the winter when I could have flights where I could be outside in 14°F temperatures for 15-20+ minutes (dressed warmly of course) while we prep the plane for the flight, then being in the cabin at 70-75°F, to being in warm, humid, muggy 75°F South Florida, all within a span of 2-3 hrs. It’s the going from the really, really cold dry air, to warm dry air, to warm to hot humid air in such a relatively short time frame that concerned me because I didn’t know how the ink itself would fair (and honestly still don’t know how well the ink will handle the really cold to really warm temperature changes because of it being late-winter/early-spring when I flew with my Metropolitan).

The other concern I had was the higher cabin pressure of the plane I fly. Most airliners max pressure differential for the cabin is 8.0-8.5 psi., the plane I flew before had a max cabin pressure of 5.6psi, and the plane I fly now has a max cabin pressure of 9.4psi. I wasn’t sure how well the converter and the ink would handle this higher pressure differential and was concerned I would have more problems with leaks. I had flights at 43,000ft with a cabin pressure differential of 9.4psi to flights going from 50°F to warm, muggy, and humid 80°F in about 1.5hrs, to flights that were only about 30 minutes with a pressure differential of around 6psi.

After six days of flying, with multiple flights per day (both in the back of an airliner and on the plane I fly), I can say that the only issues I had were some very minor nib creep, and even this was no more than what you would expect after an extended writing session, and a couple of hard starts. The hard starts were on the last day when I was flying home and was doing a sudoku puzzle and I was leaving the cap off for a bit and with a half empty converter. These are issues which could happen sitting at a desk, so I almost tempted to say that I had zero issues with flying and using the Metropolitan & CON-50 converter this week.

Other than the times I was writing with it, my pen was stored nib up in my shirt pocket. This is a big key when traveling with fountain pens because it allows any air trapped in the ink chamber to escape through the nib and feed without forcing any ink out, other than maybe a tiny bit from the ink in the feed, which if it does will probably not be any worse than what you see with nib creep. I had no problems writing with the pen during any phase of flight, including climbing and descending, and I still believe that as I explained in the first post, that regulating the pressure inside the pen is a big key reason why I didn’t have any problems.

If you plan on flying with a fountain pen, the best thing you can do to avoid any issues is to keep your pen stored nib up. A lot of articles say to keep the ink chamber full and not to fly with a partially filled ink chamber, but in my experience this isn’t as important as keeping the nib up when not in use. I’m not saying these articles are wrong and I’m right, just that in my experience by regulating the pressure inside the pen by writing with it (even just a scribble or two) during the flight, you are allowing the pressure to equalize between the pen and the cabin and minimizing the risk of ink being forced out of the nib. These are my thoughts and experiences, and I would love to hear your experiences of flying with fountain pens Here are a couple of other posts that you may find interesting.

• Brian Goulet did a video and flew with the pens nib down to see what would happen.
• Doug Lane of Modern Stationer has a post on his experience.