http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=4
Annals of Medicine
The Checklist
by Atul Gawande
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Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had advanced. In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert.
With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident. The Army ultimately ordered almost thirteen thousand of the aircraft, which it dubbed the B-17. And, because flying the behemoth was now possible, the Army gained a decisive air advantage in the Second World War which enabled its devastating bombing campaign across Nazi Germany.
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While focused at medicine, this article certainly drives home the value of checklists. I’m going to figure out how I can incorporate this in my daily life. I’ve had enough disasters that I could use some “crash avoidence”. Seems so simple. But, then so is any “great idea”.
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Reinke Faces Life 