Hi folks,
Maybe it’s just me, but I used to roll my eyes at checklists. They’re usually pretty boring, they’re a symbol of bureaucracy, and they’re insulting by insinuating that I can’t remember what to do without them. But then I learned that checklists beat the NAZIs and helped us win WWII.
In 1935, the US Army (there was no Air Force yet) was looking for a new bomber. Boeing tossed its hat in the ring with the Model 299, a massive four engine plane that exceeded all of the Army’s requirements. The Army was sold, but during testing on October 30, 1935, the plane crashed, killing Boeing’s chief test pilot and an Army test pilot while injuring several others.
The problem? Planes had become too complex for pilots to fly by memory alone.
The crash nearly ruined Boeing, but the Army still wanted the planes, so Boeing developed a simple and elegant solution – the pre-flight checklist. Following the introduction of the checklist, Boeing flew without incident and the Army ordered nearly 13,000 copies of what was renamed the B-17 Flying Fortress. And as the pilots continued flying, they developed more checklists for routine activities, introducing more reliability, reducing the time to complete sequences, and reducing overall workload.
You may be thinking “uh, we’re not test pilots and we’re not fighting for the survival of democracy and freedom”. Debatable, but potentially true. Nonetheless we are doing reasonably complex things. And we’re doing them routinely, which is the ideal combination for a checklist. Responding to an incident? Assessing common controls? Flowing new policy through a control board? All opportunities to see if developing a checklist would help improve the reliability and quality of our output.
Or, if nothing else, just use a checklist to make yourself feel better:
Rex
