Flight students learn quickly that the checklist is one of the most important tools they have. Right from the start of training, flight instructors often will break out the pilot’s operating handbook (POH) and introduce the use of checklists to manage even the simplest tasks. Before you ever sit in the airplane, you’ll find yourself with checklist in hand, doing a preflight inspection of the airframe, engine compartment, and appropriate fluids such as fuel and oil quantities.
Using a checklist isn’t arbitrary or optional. It’s listed repeatedly in the practical test standards for all pilot certification levels, and the FAA has gone so far as to specifically mention it in the list of special emphasis areas examiners are expected to consider during a practical test.
The FAA is so convinced that checklist usage is critically important to the safety of flight, the Private Pilot Practical Test Standards include 64 separate references to the word. Virtually every task included in the practical test includes a completion standard that reads something like, “Completes appropriate checklist.” From the preflight inspection through engine start to takeoff, emergency descent, landing, go-arounds, and even shut-down procedures, the applicant is expected to use a checklist throughout the practical test. Highly skilled professional pilots use a checklist for even the most mundane tasks during their entire careers.
To complicate matters even more, there is more than one type of checklist. Mentions of the PAVE checklist and the IM SAFE checklist also appear (see “IM SAFE,” below).
Ironically, there is very little talk about where the idea for checklists came from, and how it came to be adopted by pilots. The pioneers of flight didn’t use checklists—at least not in the early years. The Wright brothers didn’t use them, nor did Glenn Curtiss or Charles Lindbergh.
It wasn’t until 1935 that aviators began to see the benefit of using a standardized list of steps to accomplish specific tasks in an aircraft. The change did not come easily, however.
Boeing’s Model 299—the prototype for the B-17 Flying Fortress—was a hulking beast of an airplane. With four radial engines mounted on her wings, an advertised cruising speed of 182 mph, and a range of 2,000 miles, it was big and powerful and long-legged by the standards of the day. It was also complicated. Too complicated to fly from memory, as it turned out.
When the test flight crew took the 299 into the air for the final phase aircraft evaluations by the U.S. Army, everyone anticipated a tremendous success. The startup, taxi, and takeoff all went well. Immediately after the takeoff, a serious problem became apparent. The crew had failed to disengage the elevator and rudder locks. Unable to release the locks, the pilots had no recourse and minimal control as the angle of attack steadily increased. The airplane stalled, rolled, and crashed, where it burned ferociously. Two of the five on board died of their injuries.
The resulting inquiry determined pilot error led to the crash, which was undoubtedly the case. The question became how to prevent similar failures in the future. The answer was the development of a checklist to guide the crew for every major task or maneuver they might perform.
The checklist in the POH is literally a list of items that can be thought of as a what-to-do series of steps. As long as you do what the checklist tells you to do, you can be confident you have not omitted anything important. Nearly 80 years after its inception, the checklist continues to provide a high level of safety and security for pilots and passengers all over the globe.
A movement growing in the flight training industry asks flight students and pilots of all certification levels to go beyond knowing what to do and begin to ask themselves, Why am I doing this?
Why is good. Why is important. Knowing to open the cowl flaps of a Bonanza prior to takeoff is good. Knowing why they are being opened is better. The Cessna 172 checklist tells us to retract flaps incrementally during a go-around, first to 20 degrees, then to 10 degrees, then to their fully retracted position. The pilot who knows only what to do may retract the flaps too quickly, negating the reason for the step-by-step retraction. The pilot who knows why the flaps should come up in stages is less likely to hastily raise them all at once, reducing lift while low and slow to the point the aircraft might settle onto the runway.
Knowing what to do is good. Knowing why it’s being done leads pilots to a higher level of learning and expands their intellectual toolbox in the process. The knowledgeable pilot goes beyond rote learning, breezes past understanding, masters application, and launches into the rarified air of correlated learning.
Consider this example. The before take-off checklist instructs pilots to verify that controls are free and correct. Typically this results in a pilot pumping the elevator up and down a couple times, pushing the rudder pedals to the stops once or twice, and wiggling the ailerons a bit. If that is your practice, you have complied with the checklist and might consider yourself to be in good shape. But if you ask yourself why you would bother to verify that your controls are free and correct before flight, this otherwise pedestrian checklist item becomes a very different exercise. Mechanics work on airplanes, and sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes the manual they are working from is incorrect. Errors can be introduced over time. Cables can be routed improperly and internal bracing can wear through or break. So we want to make sure our controls are free before we fly, which is to say they move from stop to stop without interference. We also want to make sure they are correct on all three axes. If you pull on the yoke and your elevator moves upward, you push on the right rudder pedal and the rudder deflects to the right, and move the aileron controls to full left deflection and see the right aileron shoot upward, you need to head back to the hangar.
When you pull back on the elevator control, the elevator should move upward. This spoils lift on the tail, causing it to fall while the nose rises, and a climb results. Pushing the right rudder pedal should cause the rudder to deflect to the right, creating lower pressure on the left side of the rudder, which will pivot the aircraft clockwise on the yaw axis, resulting in the nose moving right. And if you put full left deflection on the aileron controls, the right aileron should droop down while the left rises up. If the right aileron rises as it did in our example, your roll inputs will be reversed when you gain airspeed, forcing you to think hard about how to control an airplane in flight when the rudder and aileron controls are crossed.
Every aircraft has its own checklists. It is wise to spend time with a qualified flight instructor before transitioning to a new airplane to really get to know it. That is true regardless if you fly a light sport aircraft and are stepping up to a high performance aircraft, or vice versa. Make it your practice to learn the aircraft and its systems. All pilots should develop their own personal checklist as well. The IM SAFE checklist asks us to accurately self-evaluate our health to verify that we’re fit to fly. Knowing why the particular items it espouses are of importance is even more critical than memorizing each of them in order.
Be a rebel. Learn to go beyond the checklist and get into an ever-deepening understanding of why.
Plus: Watch two pilots preflight a King Air C90 using a Google Glass checklist.
