You Use Checklists – Admit it!

Checklists have been in aviation for over one hundred and sixteen years. The first time this ubiquitous part of our aviation lives came into public view was when Peter Pan, a character written by J.M. Barrie, first appeared in “The Little White Bird” in 1902.

The first aviation checklist that P. Pan used predated the beginning of powered flight by one year, implying that checklists must have come from ancient aliens. I wonder if this is where they got the name “Pan American” for our nation’s first international airline.

But I digress.

Here is a copy of the first checklist used in aviation by Pan Aviation:

BEFORE TAKEOFF

· Grab Wendy

· Fairy Dust -- Sprinkle

· Happy Thoughts – Engage

Our true aviation foremothers and forefathers had no use for checklists when they plied the heavens in airplanes with cutesy names like Jenny or Graf Zeppelin. They jumped in, adjusted their goggles, lit a cigarette, and took to the skies singing a happy flying ditty.?

Later in our aviation history, checklist use went from fairy dust disbursement plans to a method to avoid gear-up landings and dropping bombs on the wrong city. Again.?

War Helps Us Reinvent Things!

During World War II, also known as “Hey, let’s fight Germany again,” pilots discovered that the airplanes they were flying had become much more complicated. They no longer could fly by memory and then go dancing the Lindy at the Savoy with Ginger and Fred.?

Many military missions were not getting off of the ground simply because they had no access to a “before start” checklist. Over thirty percent of every squadron forgot to start their engines. They were embarrassing themselves and their units by smoking and singing happy flying songs while their aircraft sat immobile on the ramp.

Something had to change, so in 1941 Congress mandated that the military form a committee to study all of the Peter Pan stories for clues on how to write a decent checklist. They did this, and we won World War II in plenty of time to prepare for the Korean War.

You have been using checklists ever since your first flying lesson. Admit it!?

Some flight instructor, either military or civilian, thrust a grimy sweat-stained piece of printed cardboard into the hand you were planning on using to hold your cigarette and demanded that you not only “read it, but do it.” Your instructor let out a creepy little laugh and then told you they could not fly with you today because a charter just came up.

The canceled lesson gave you the quality time you needed to study the checklist while drinking burnt FBO coffee and fending off the amorous attentions of Nana, the airport dog.

What Checklists are for

Many people would tell you that aviation checklists exist to help you not forget things like those hapless bomber pilots of WWII. Others would say to you that reading and running a checklist is the best way to assure that the “runway noise suppressors” (landing gear) are down and locked before impact with our planet.?

There are only two other factoids I could add from my vast and mind-numbingly long aviation career about checklists:

·???????Reading them onto some sort of cockpit voice recorder can come in very handy during one of your many after-flight courtroom appearances.?

And

·???????Cardboard checklists make great sunshades if you cram them, just right, into the corner of your windshield.

For extra credit, any experienced pilot would also accept these answers as uses for checklists:

·???????Device to scrape bugs off of things

·???????Toothpick

·???????Bug swatter

·???????Coffee spill cleaner-upper

·???????Cover for the weather radar screen when what you are looking at on it is too scary

People used cardboard checklists for these beautiful and essential tasks until Bill Gates, and Pablo Picasso invented the computerized checklist while doodling on their napkins at the Shreveport IHOP in 1981.?

Open wide and click on the action item.

Computer checklists are on many aircraft owned by retired oral surgeons, hedge fund managers, and others with more money than sense. These checklists are demanding little cusses that won’t leave you well enough alone if you forget to down the landing gear.?

They can get downright persnickety about things. Sometimes they get so annoying that you want to “reboot” them into the nearest mountain, but that would be wrong. Or so my passengers have told me.

These electronic nags in the sky are useless when it comes to scraping bugs off things or blocking the harmful rays of the sun that are threatening to interrupt your airborne nap.?

How to Use a Checklist

Many government-funded checklist studies performed by leather elbowed tweed jacketed “aviation professors” have indicated that checklist use isn’t as easy as it seems.

Pilots started at the bottom of the checklist and read up instead of at the top and reading down. The professors called this “spatial disorientation” and recommended that pilots pay close attention to the primary flight instruments when running a checklist. Reading left to right, for some reason, was not a problem except for pilots who speak Hebrew or Urdu.

Even more checklist tips

Like I said earlier, I have extensive checklist experience that spans from the days of fairy dust to dealing with those airborne electronically brained pilot hassle bunnies. I am more than qualified to teach you how to properly read a checklist while aviating above the land of the free and most formerly Soviet Bloc nations.?

Here are some steps. Please keep in mind that if you are flying by yourself, it is still vital to your lung health that you do all of this out loud:

·???????Hold the checklist firmly in your preferred cigarette hand, stare at it intently, and then loudly shout its title. For example, you might shout ENGINE FIRE!

·???????Once you have everybody’s attention, you can then shout out orders that you read off the list to nobody in particular. Things like: MASTER SWITCH ON! or: ARM THE WEAPON!

·???????You must follow all the steps with your thumb, so you don’t get lost. If you are using an electronic checklist, you should be using an electronic thumb.

·???????After you complete the checklist, you should fling it violently at your copilot or frightened right seat passenger and shout: CHECKLIST COMPLETE!

One last bit of advice. Someday, no matter how long you have fought the idea, you might find yourself taking a check ride with either a DPE (democratic pilot estimator) or a humanoid from the FAA. I have, up until recently, been at least one of those things, and I can tell you from experience that the only thing we pilot examiners love to hear more than “here is your money” is “There must be a checklist for this.”

You can’t go wrong running a checklist unless you choose to run the before landing checklist instead of the before takeoff checklist and then jump off a building without first applying copious amounts of fairy dust.