Why Use a Checklist?

The primary reason is risk reduction—to make sure that nothing that can cause a crash is mis-set. Flight controls and engine controls are the obvious ones.

Flight controls mean ailerons, elevator, and rudder, of course, but on some airplanes, if the trim is mis-set, the plane might be difficult or impossible to control. But there are variations from plane to plane. Motor gliders, for example, have speedbrakes/spoilers that could adversely affect takeoff performance. 

Similarly, flaps can be a critical item on some planes but not on others. Years ago, a very young pilot took her first passenger, her husband, on her first flight after getting a private certificate after 125 hours. Part of the Cessna 150 checklist was to put the flaps full down for preflight, and at some point later on, to retract them before takeoff. That flap retraction was not performed, and although the airplane made it into the air, it did not maintain sustained flight.

On my relatively high powered Van’s RV-9A, flaps are not a critical item, unless the runway is short. Taking off with full flaps makes the plane levitate off the runway at lower speed but does not create a hazard to flight. Even if the trim is mis-set, the plane is readily controlled.

For engines, checklists make sure that they will make full power and will continue to make full power until the airplane has enough speed and altitude that the pilot can correct any mis-setting. This requirement can involve all of the engine controls—throttle, prop, mixture, carb heat, ignition, fuel pump, and fuel selector. Sort of…

There’s a gray area here—several of them, in fact. Taking off on one magneto may provide enough power for takeoff and climb acceptably, or it may not. Carb heat may noticeably decrease engine power, depending on the airplane. On my RV-9A, there is no noticeable drop in engine rpm when checking carb heat on the ground, but in one encounter with carb ice in a summer cumulus cloud, it worked just fine. Your airplane may be different.

Then there’s the fuel selector. High-wing planes (and the rare low-wing models) with a “both” position make it easy. Follow the manual and take off on “both.” Different situation for low-wing airplanes. Way back when, common practice was to start with the engine drawing fuel from one tank and, to make sure it could draw fuel from the other tank, switch tanks right before takeoff. Several accidents were caused when the engine could not draw fuel from the other tank, but there was enough gas in the carburetor and fuel lines to get the plane into the air before the engine quit.

A better practice is to do the takeoff and run-up on one tank and, only when there is sufficient altitude, check that the engine will run on the other tank. If it won’t, then switch back to the good tank and go back and land.

In Cessnas, making sure that seat is locked in position is a high priority. If the seat comes unlatched on takeoff and slides back, the obvious handhold for pulling the seat forward again is the control wheel. This, of course, would lead to full-up elevator with likely disastrous consequences. Regular Cessna pilots know to double-check the seat latches, but there’s a very good reason it’s on the checklist in the first place. 

Doors, windows, and canopies may or may not be as critical as the seat position, depending on the airplane. I was taught that in a Piper, if the door came unlatched, to come back and land. In a single-engine Cessna, it’s not that hard to close the door in flight, and I taught that to my students. In both cases, however, the distraction can be significant. Pilots of Beech Bonanzas and Barons also know that relatching a door in flight is usually not worth trying. A prompt landing is the best choice.

Then there are canopies. Sometimes an improperly closed canopy can be a major annoyance, sometimes worse.

An improperly latched sliding canopy can open on takeoff or climb, and this is, of course, a distraction. Hopefully it can be closed. On the other hand, the side-opening canopy on the RV-4 is designed to come off the airplane if it is opened at a too high speed, and this is to facilitate bailing out.

At Oshkosh one year, there was a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) presentation on accident investigation. The subject plane was a sleek, composite, low-wing airplane with a forward-tilting canopy. After considerable sleuthing and wreckage analysis, it was determined that the nonstandard canopy latch came loose, allowing the canopy to open in flight. In that configuration, it didn’t depart the airplane but, instead, blocked airflow to the tail, with fatal results.

Checklists can also include tasks to lessen workload later. A pre-takeoff item to set the comm and nav (GPS) radios and the autopilot as well as any reminder bugs on the instruments, is a good reminder, but if these steps are overlooked, the airplane will continue to fly. However, the potentially excessive and inconvenient workload of setting these after takeoff could be a threat to situational awareness and errors.

Not all checklists are related to the engine and airframe. In my glass-cockpit airplane, on an instrument approach, there are a number of things to be set and to look out for. Those are on the checklist. By comparison, in a steam-gauge cockpit, much more information is kept in your head, and many of those avionics settings aren’t even there.

But even before starting the engine, there are things that can be overlooked if distractions are present. These include making sure that the towbar is off the nosewheel, and even that the preflight inspection has been performed, especially fuel and oil quantities. I’ve known of all these to have been significant. 

Then there are passenger briefings and making sure that all of the paperwork is in order.

And my most embarrassing moment, that I never told anybody about, was doing a first flight in an airplane after major work had been done to it. I hadn’t familiarized myself adequately with the radio, and on takeoff, I got blasted with audio. I obviously managed to complete the flight, but I was surprised to have missed such an elemental setting.

There is a philosophical difference between a “do list” (do these steps one by one, following on the checklist) and a checklist, where you do things and then check them. My opinion is that the checklist style has advantages. With a do list, if it gets lost in the cockpit or is missing from the airplane, you can’t fly. With a checklist, really learning it can be part of understanding the airplane. And if you find yourself in a stressful situation, busy with traffic and radio calls, you can do the learned checklist in your head without the distraction of a do-list.

I once gave an annual proficiency flight to a young private pilot who lectured me extensively about how a do list was the only way to execute a checklist. As we taxied out of the run-up area, before we had gone 5 feet, I slammed on the brakes. He looked at me quizzically until I asked, “Are you going to do item six on the checklist?”

Self-assessment is important in the “checklist or not” consideration as well. When I was an active, really sharp CFI in my 30s, flying multiple kinds of airplanes all the time, the student had the checklist, not me. I generated my own set of memory aids that would cover all the kinds of airplanes I was flying, and I put each one’s numbers and quirks on a 3-by-5 card as a reminder.

There’s a whole other reason for using checklists, and that is preparing the pilot mentally for the next “flight phase,” such as descent or landing, among others. For example, a landing checklist will help the pilot think about things important to landing that weren’t important in cruise, even if those items aren’t on the checklist. This reason is more important in jets than to us single-engine pilots, but it still applies.

These days, coming up on 50 years of flying, my physiology and psychology are starting to manifest all those symptoms of aging that you read about. Damn it. I now use the checklist faithfully, just like I did as a young pilot, even though I know the airplane intimately.

Despite the satisfaction of operating complex machinery in a challenging environment, there’s something soul soothing about flying a plane so simple that, once in the air, no checklists are required. When I had my AirCam, after takeoff, the only checklist items to fuss with were the fuel pumps. Later, a factory rep told me that I didn’t have to mess with even those. That style of totally unconcerned flying was special.

There’s lots more to checklist philosophy and usage than will fit in this column, lots of gray areas and a few very dark areas. The best advice? Know your airplane so well that you don’t need a checklist—but use it anyway.