Can you just deduct the average expenses for flight crew on my tax return?

By Jason Watson (Google+)

Nope. This doesn’t work for a few reasons. First, you always need to substantiate that you actually paid for an expense. Second, while we use guidelines for specific pilot and flight attendant expenses (such as home laundering for uniforms), there aren’t averages with any statistical significance. Lastly, it is not good tax accounting practice to deduct figures that are estimates or cannot be substantiated. If we could, we would- it would save us a lot of work.