A discussion thread from a professional pilots' forum touches on a mundane but recurring topic in flight deck culture: personal hygiene habits during long duty days, specifically the use of dental floss picks after in-flight meals. The original poster, a first officer flying the Airbus A319/320, describes a routine of eating during long flights and then spending 20-30 seconds flossing before disposing of the pick in the trash bag. The question posed to the community is straightforward — does this cross a line of professionalism or basic etiquette in a shared, confined workspace, or is it simply a non-issue among colleagues who spend hours together in a small cockpit.
While this may seem like a trivial matter compared to the operational and regulatory topics that typically dominate aviation news, it reflects a genuine and recurring theme in flight deck crew resource management: the flight deck is simultaneously a workplace, a shared personal space, and a highly visible professional environment. Pilots on long-haul or multi-leg domestic days often eat meals at the controls due to limited break opportunities, especially on narrowbody aircraft without dedicated crew rest areas. This creates unavoidable overlap between personal maintenance tasks — eating, hydration, hygiene — and professional conduct in front of a colleague who may be a check airman, a new hire, or someone from a different generation or cultural background with different norms. Threads like this one are common on pilot forums precisely because there is no formal guidance from airlines or regulators on such etiquette; it is left entirely to informal cockpit culture, pairing dynamics, and personal judgment.
The broader relevance to working pilots lies in the reminder that CRM extends beyond checklists and communication protocols into the softer, often unspoken realm of interpersonal comfort and professionalism. Two-pilot crews are frequently paired for the first time on a given trip, sometimes for multi-day pairings, and small behavioral choices — from cockpit conversation topics to snack choices to personal grooming — can influence the working relationship and overall atmosphere for the trip. Some captains and FOs are highly tolerant of casual behavior, viewing the cockpit as an extension of a long shared workday where practicality trumps formality; others hold a stricter view that the flight deck should maintain a baseline of professional decorum regardless of duty length, partly because of how it might appear if observed by jumpseaters, mechanics, or during unexpected visits. There is also a practical safety angle: distraction during any non-sterile-cockpit phase, however brief, is generally something crews are trained to minimize, and activities like flossing are typically reserved for cruise phases well away from critical phases of flight.
This kind of discussion also illustrates how pilot-specific online communities serve as informal mentorship and cultural-calibration spaces, particularly for newer first officers uncertain about unwritten norms that never appear in an FOM or AOM. As airlines continue to hire large numbers of relatively low-time pilots into narrowbody first officer seats amid ongoing industry growth, these informal forums increasingly function as a substitute for the kind of hangar-flying conversations that used to pass down cockpit etiquette organically through years of shared line flying with more experienced captains. The dental-floss question, however small, underscores a larger truth about professional flying: technical proficiency is necessary but not sufficient, and the soft skills of shared-space etiquette remain a live and evolving conversation within the pilot community.