I was a strange–no, “atypical” — flight student at the university flight program because I already had my private pilot’s license and instrument rating (so I could legally fly in the clouds) when I showed up. So instead of the typical Private Pilot/Bachelor’s degree scenario, I started out by training for my commercial license and going after a Master’s degree in Aerospace Education. I was in my mid-twenties, while most of the other flight students were younger, going for a bachelor’s degree in Professional Pilot. I absolutely loved the Commercial and Flight Instructor classes. I loved the flying, too. I was heading for an eventual choice of dream careers– professional pilot for a while, to gain street cred & industry experience, and then university professor, because I loved helping people and I was beginning to love the qualitative research methods taught in my Master’s classes (stats, not so much).

My instructors always told me I was a “good stick” (meaning I could physically handle a plane really well), but I had trouble remembering checklists. I chalked it up to one of the so-called laws of learning, “first-learned-best-remembered” or the Law of Primacy. My first 15 hours of flight training was in an antique taildragger Taylorcraft with no checklists. Also, no radios, no headsets, not even an electric starter. Those days were the good old days– simple aircraft, simple flights to get breakfast, grass airstrips, and just a lot of fun. However, the flight school was all rules and business, which got on my nerves sometimes. I had to step up my flying in a big way to conform to the normal practices of flying more complex aircraft. Pilots are supposed to use a checklist every time they fly for preflight inspection, engine start, pre-takeoff, takeoff, climb, cruise, descent, approach, landing and engine shutdown. Oh and every conceivable emergency has one too. Yes, it’s a lot of damn checklists. Yes, I hated them all.

An acceptable method of checklist usage for simple aircraft is a flow scan. You start at one side of the instrument panel and visually look at every control and instrument that needs to be set, and set it. And you say each thing out loud to yourself even if there is nobody else in the plane (yes, non-pilots in the area will look at you weird.) The flow method fits my mind better. Instead of interrupting my euphoria of bird-like natural flight to dig through the door pocket to find the correct checklist and then mechanically read each item off and check it, I just said “OK, time for landing checklist” and went through the visual flow to ensure everything was set correctly– flaps, trim, mixture, throttle, lights. For a simple plane you know very well, this works out fine. But for a more complex airplane with propeller controls, retractable landing gear, pressurization systems, and complex electrical systems, a flow mindset for normal operations is a recipe for disaster. It sets you up to forget any of a myriad of small but important items you might not see on your flow check. The flow technique is generally NOT used in the realm of commercial flying in complex aircraft, with few exceptions.

On one particular training flight in a light twin-engine Piper Seminole when I was preparing for my commercial multi-engine check ride (flight test), my instructor, Manny, decided to simulate an engine failure while I was practicing an instrument approach. I was wearing “foggles,” goggles that blocked the view out the windows (simulating flying in clouds), so my brain was fully occupied keeping the aircraft upright and on course by using the instruments. The approach was a DME arc, which is basically flying a constant-radius partial circle pattern to get lined up with the runway. We were fairly low over the ground and my workload was high because I couldn’t see outside. I was flying solely by reference to a collection of analog instruments, basically just needles and numbers. When I suddenly felt the airplane yaw to one side and heard an engine go quiet, I looked down at my kneeboard, where I had a typed-out and printed a simple emergency checklist for engine failure:

1. Dead Foot-Dead Engine
2. Throttle – Check/Idle
3. Prop – Feather
4. Mixture – Idle Cutoff

Manny was small in stature, highly intelligent, maybe a little Napoleon-esque, and a strict, by-the-book, Checklist Nazi. (I’m sure he’s making $400k flying trans-oceanic package runs for FedEx by now). His voice sqauwked urgently in my headset. “NO, YOU MUST USE THE APPROVED CHECKLIST!!” So I reached down to pick up the flight-school approved Emergency Checklist. There were 3 laminated 8.5 x 11″ tri-folded pages in the side pocket. I plucked one out of the pocket, flipped it around, and couldn’t find the engine failure emergency checklist. Picked up another, flipped it around, while maintaining control of the aircraft without looking outside, and finally threw the thing into the back seat and yelled out “DEAD FOOT, DEAD ENGINE, THROTTLE PROP MIXTURE !” and simulated feathering the dead engine’s prop and moving the mixture to idle-cutoff (we didn’t actually kill a good engine in practice). Manny’s eyes were big as saucers. “YOU CAN’T DO THAT, YOU MUST USE THE APPROVED CHECKLIST!” I said, “Manny, if I took the time to find that checklist and read all 15 things on it, we’d be a smoking fucking hole.” Having successfully dealt with the problem in my own unapproved way, I continued the approach to landing, and even remembered to put the landing gear down.

The Dead-Foot-Dead-Engine technique is a life-saver because when one engine fails on a twin, the airplane yaws sideways toward the engine that is not producing thrust. Your feet, always on the rudder pedals, automatically compensate for this by trying to straighten the plane out. The foot that is slack, or “dead,” is always on the same side as the failed engine. It’s a quick, intuitive method for knowing which engine was bad. Our experienced multi-engine classroom instructor taught us this as a deadly memory-item (as in, remember this until you’re dead). “Feathering” the prop is important because it turns the propeller blades of a windmilling inoperative engine into the wind, minimizing drag and allowing the operational engine to better maintain altitude. However, many multi-engine pilots have wrecked because they feathered the operating engine’s propeller instead of the dead one. Because they DIDN’T pay attention to their dead foot, or got lost in a sea of a dozen checklists.

Manny chastised me a bit, but signed me off for my multi-engine check ride anyway. It was the best (and last) check ride I ever flew. The examiner, a beloved retired TWA pilot, thought my simple 4-item checklist was a cool idea because it did the job quickly without inducing panic.

Now, 20 years later, I understand that it wasn’t just the law of primacy that made me hate checklists. It was my ADHD brain. Reading a line of text, doing an item, and reading the next line of text without skipping one is a challenge. Not getting distracted in the middle of a checklist and forgetting to do the rest of it is also, embarrassingly, a challenge. Airplane manufacturers provide operating checklists for pilots, but flight school operators like to add one, two or a dozen extra things to them to cover their asses, incorporate flight school rules, or just over-explain things. The three double-sided-laminated-tri-fold abominations in that Seminole only served to give a pilot TOO MUCH information that was impossible for an easily-distracted, efficiency-loving brain to work with. I think our retired airline-pilot examiner knew that, too.