Pre-flight checklists

I have started reading 'The Checklist Manifesto' by Dr. Atul Gawande. An accomplished surgeon, Dr. Gawande has started the book with stories of how lives were saved and sometimes almost lost because the team in the OR followed strict procedure or failed to, respectively.

He also tells the story of how pilot checklists were born. It was at Wright Airfield in Dayton Ohio in 1935 where the US Army and US Army Air Corps were evaluating the next generation long range bomber for the US Military. The Boeing B299 had already impressed the evaluation team till then, outclassing the competition in terms of range, speed and payload.

The military brass was there just to complete the formality. On that day, the sleek aircraft roared down the runway and took the skies and climbed sharply to 300 feet; at which point two of its four engines stalled and the plane tipped on its wing and crashed to the ground killing 2 of its 5 crew members.

The investigation revealed that there was no mechanical failure and the crash was due to pilot error. The B299, one newspaper reported, was too much aircraft for one man to fly. The pilot was required to control the air fuel mixture to its four engines separately and to control the pitch on its constant speed propellers individually and to watch engine temperature and oil pressure on those four engines individually all in addition to keeping an eye on altitude, air speed, rudder, elevators, ailerons and flaps. The pilot on that day had missed releasing a new locking mechanism on the elevators keeping them angling the aircraft upwards until it hit stall speed.

The Air Corps ordered the next best aircraft from Douglas but the Army ordered a few from Boeing from Research purposes using a legal loophole. The army delivered these planes to the 2nd Bombardment group at Langley field in Virginia and launched a study to figure out how to fly this plane more reliably. This team came up with the idea of pre-flight checklists.

The checklist has been saving lives in Operation Theaters and in aluminium cylinders shooting through the sky ever since.

Incidentally, after the US Army figured out that the 4 engines behemoth was indeed fly-able, they went on the order more than 12000 of the Boeing  Flying Fortress for World War II.

More stuff from this amazing book to follow. Watch this space.