One young, freshly-minted private pilot arrived at my school wanting a checkout in our 172’s. As we walked together to the airplane, he bragged a little about how proficient he had become through his training and how anxious he was to fly for the airlines. Once at the airplane, no sooner had we opened our respective doors, set down our things, then his cell phone rang. Interrupting me and his preflight, he answered it and began chatting with a friend. I let this go on for about twenty seconds, then admonished him for both his poor attitude and for wasting my time.

Embarrassed, he quickly hung up. Here we were on the eve of a potentially dangerous activity and his mind was elsewhere. He continued with the preflight, but clearly was disorganized, scattered in his thoughts and actions. There was no flow, no organization, even though the information and proper sequence of inspection are clearly printed on the written checklist.

I was called away briefly from the airplane, but not long enough for him to have completed a proper preflight. When I returned, he was seated snugly inside, buckled in, ready to fly. Yet, he had forgotten to remove the cowl plugs, despite their traditional bright red color, a stout ribbon connecting them, and identification by a long, red “REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT” flag. During a proper preflight by even a semi-conscious pilot, it is impossible to miss them.

I now began to consider the status of the other items he supposedly also inspected. Whoever trained him to fly apparently had not ingrained in him the importance of the right attitude. Moreover, his painfully-awkward handling of the written checklist led me to consider the terrifying possibility that this may well have been the first time he had ever consulted one.

Pilots have personal reasons that draw them to fly. As we gear up for a flight, we all feel that thrill, the anticipation, that childlike wonder well up within us. While we collect our things, across our faces grows a smile of satisfaction, that smirk that comes from knowing we are different, that we are among that special breed of humans, fulfilling our childhood dream of flight.

What keeps us doing this? Is it true love of the open sky, the power derived from the machine, the oneness we feel with the bird, the wind in our hair, perhaps the constant challenge? Or is what keeps us going the blind luck of never having had a mishap, an incident, or an accident? Is it that we haven’t had the airplane break, suffered an in-flight fire, gotten hurt, or lost a friend or loved one to aviation?

As beginners in all this, we were afraid of many things, the acceleration, the disquieting bouncing through rough air, the height from the ground, the landing, the surprise discovery of that third axis of rotation, learning to taxi with our feet instead of this steering wheel thing in front of us.

Well, we got used to all of that and more. These things are second nature to us now, instinct; we welcome them. It’s part of what makes us among that special breed of humans; we do things differently from the rest of humanity. What’s more, we enjoy this difference. Membership in this elite club is what makes that goofy smile spread insidiously across our child-like faces. There is no cure; we can’t help it. It’s the price of membership, the penalty of freedom.

Yes, yes, we know these things. All this is the price we pay for being a pilot. But at what point did all this childlike yearning to be free and taking to the skies and rocketing through the heavens with the agility, grace, and abandon of a bird make us forget that we are not birds, that we were not physically made to fly? At what point in realizing our dream did we learn to take short cuts, the easy way, the lazy, quicker way?

While we are struggling to wrap our minds around that question, when did we decide to skip things on our checklists? For that matter, when did we decide to skip the checklist? What is it that we choose, for the sake of our spouses, our children, our passengers, to leave out? After all, those things we skip never break anyway, do they?

In my busy career as an instructor, one of the most frustrating things I faced was getting pilots, both new and older, more experienced ones, to properly use a written checklist. My experiences related to checklist offenses are far too numerous and boring to list, so I will satisfy my point here by highlighting only a few.

To clarify the purpose of checklists, especially to those pilots who steadfastly refused to take me seriously on this point, writing me off as some kind of aviation checklist fanatic, a checklist is a written procedure, usually created by the aircraft’s manufacturer, with the sole purpose of increasing the chances that the pilot and his passengers, not to mention anyone on the ground inconveniently in his flight path, will live long enough to make it home that evening to enjoy supper with his loved ones.

Those who created these lists are not evil people nor are they a threat to our freedoms. Their late-night efforts at the office were neither to imprison us in a revolving door of obsessive procedure nor to delay our arriving at our destinations in a timely fashion. Surprising as it may seem to some pilots I’ve known, those efforts were to help us.

I flew instrument approaches one evening after work with a young lady I’d met through my school’s website. Sure, she was a little tired from work, therefore, a little reluctant, but her attitude was clearly more organic. The resentment I harbor today is directed more at her flight instructor than at her. How he let this attitude develop in her is a source of constant frustration for the rest of us who must live in the aftermath, and is something beyond the regulatory control of the FAA.

We met at the airport, naturally. I collected the airplane’s binder with the important documents, squawk sheet, and keys. By the time I caught up with her, she was already settled comfortably into the left seat of the Skyhawk. I opened the right door, set my things on my seat, listed our names on the sign-out sheet, and recorded the Hobbs. I plugged in my headset, then climbed in, asking if she’d already done the preflight. Her response haunts me to this day. With a nervous, weary, self-important laugh, a dismissive wave, she sighed, “Oh my goodness, I never do a preflight.”

“Well, I always preflight my airplanes.” I said firmly.
I climbed back out, checklist in hand, and checked over the bird, item by item. At no point during my labors did she step out to assist nor did she even offer. Once settled back into my seat, I explained that this is a rental airplane and that we never know what might have happened to her at the hands of the last pilot. Despite my admonition, she never made a sound in response.

As it turned out, while taxiing to the active, I discovered a problem with the radios, so we had to return to parking to get another airplane. Again, she climbed immediately into her coveted left seat of this new bird, leaving me to fetch the keys and notebook, then to do the preflight.

Readers may be left thinking that, in fairness to me, I should have insisted she shoulder some of the burden, especially since it was I who jogged back across the ramp, then upstairs into the office to fetch the new airplane’s essentials. Well, after what I had seen of her personality and her attitude, it is unlikely she would have done it anyway. Besides, I was not about to trust my life to such a person. I will do the preflight myself, thank you very much.

Now, since this short story is about checklist abuses, I will not distract readers endlessly with the dismal performance of this safety pilot that evening. I didn’t trust her on the ground or in the air, so it should come as no surprise that, after she was unable to fly direct to the station during a relatively simple instrument approach, even after I had set it up thoroughly for her, couldn’t remember how to turn on the airport lights by keying the mic, that when we lost our landing light on final, I insisted on landing the airplane. Her steadfast refusal, her recalcitrant attitude, to follow protocol did not inspire my confidence. I never flew with her again.

Some pertinaciously protective readers might try to get her off the hook by arguing that she was probably exhausted from work, contributing to at least some of her inconsistencies and dangerous thinking. I can accept that hypothesis. If that is true, however, it speaks to yet another checklist she elected to ignore, the checklist that should be the first one we consult when we wake up in the morning, that should govern our activities no matter what we plan to do that day: IM SAFE. I’m left wondering if under these personal conditions, with all that happened to the equipment that evening, in light of her casual attitude regarding checklists, would she have chosen to fly by herself and, if so, what might have been the outcome?

Her behavior that evening illustrates what essentially otherwise would be another study falling under Aeronautical Decision Making. If someone acting as she did gets killed by her own actions, the conclusions the NTSB will draw will speak to yet another tragic example of a poor choice building upon itself. I have no doubt her eulogy would celebrate a life of hope, dreams, love, compassion, and brilliance. I’m sure she is a nice person, too. But those virtues and warm memories do little to compensate for her lack of maturity and foresight when operating within the boundaries of an activity that has inherent so little room for error as piloting an aircraft.

When I was learning to fly, I took seriously the job of being a student. Not unlike most reasonable people, I had a healthy respect for the airplane, for the whole concept of flying. I wanted to assure myself everything was in order, that I hadn’t missed anything. Consequently, I did everything by the book. My thumb became a micromanager, holding each line on the checklist hostage until I was assured the corresponding item on the aircraft was within specifications. Only then did I move on.

By this method, the checklist became ingrained onto my memory. Years later, I explained to my students that this is how I had essentially memorized the checklist. I was quick to emphasize, however, that despite this memory, I still followed the written checklist; that is what it’s for. Sure, it’s committed to memory, but only through drill. I can still forget. All a potential disaster may take to become part of my day is for me to miss one thing.

This method may sound tedious, overkill, obsessive, even unnecessary. Perhaps, but never have I taken off with a bad magneto or worn tires or a fuel leak, or with ailerons having loose hinges, or with bent metal, loose screws, bird’s nests, or a worn control cable. Neither have I gotten aloft without the proper frequency, subsequent frequencies, nor squawk already set. Never have I forgotten to extend the landing gear. How often do we read about pilots committing that faux pas?

Now, I am not here to pat myself on the back for these things. I am only admitting that using checklists, living by procedures and protocol, I have managed not only to walk away from yet another flight, but that I can revel in the luxury of knowing that flight was successful and fun, safe and well-orchestrated. Both I and the airplane had a good time. What’s more, we will fly together another day.

I will not anytime soon be in the position of handing my bent airplane over to Wentworth Aircraft Sales to sell for me on eBay. In the text, they try to make the twisted wreckage more appealing by offering some flimsy, casual effort at humor about how the sun was in the pilot’s eyes or the sky was blue or his dog distracted him by barking at a squirrel she saw on the ground, or blame it on a moment of unique leave of his senses or that he’s such a great guy otherwise, any combination of those feeble excuses conspiring to cause him to forget to the lower the undercarriage. The point is, you guys at Wentworth, casual as the excuse you offer is about the pilot’s particular dysfunction, the fact remains that he did not lower the gear, which is why we are shaking our heads in dismay at the pictures.

Apart from mechanical difficulties, the greatest cause of landing on the belly of the aircraft rather than the tires is the pilot simply forgetting to lower the gear. Wait a minute, don’t we have written checklists that address this particular issue? What in blue blazes is there to forget? If we can’t read the step from the checklist, then remember it long enough to immediately perform the function, we should not be pilots. We follow up with acronyms; GUMP comes to mind. With all of the checks and redundancies we’ve tried to instill into the activity of flying, there is no excuse for making this particular mistake.

I began complex flying in a ’63 Mooney M20C, with the unique “J-Bar” gear handle. As her aficionados will admit, retracting and extending her landing gear is almost a full-body motion, requiring even more checks, then rechecking to be sure the handle is locked into place in either position. With such an effort just to operate the landing gear, it wasn’t long before the gear operation became so ingrained in my mind, so much a habit, my muscle memory, that there is little chance I will ever forget. Still, it’s listed in the written pre-landing checklist.

When I began flying an Arrow equipped with electric gear, I carried with me this habit. Now, I’m obsessive about it in any airplane I fly such that by the time I’ve crossed the threshold, I’ve checked gear down on the order of ten times, and that’s after I’ve consulted the written checklist card, storing it back in its pocket.

So, is this what we’ve lost trying to become like the birds? After all, birds don’t preflight, don’t have checklists, do they? Well, in fact, they do. Ever watched one preening, perched on that branch of your favorite oak? In becoming pilots, was it through familiarity and comfort that we relaxed our attention to detail, lost our awareness, maybe a little fear, at least a respect, for how unique this activity is?

Perhaps what drives our arrogance, or maybe it’s a disrespect, is a terrifying, blinding over-confidence about how our knowledge and skill will triumph over any obstacle Mother Nature, the aircraft engineers, or the last pilot to fly this airplane can throw in our path.