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CAPTAIN: What the [expletive] was that?

FIRST OFFICER: I don’t know.

The pilots notified flight control that something had gone wrong. Two seconds later, their cabin pressure and oxygen levels were gone.

FIRST OFFICER: Put your mask on, Dave.

CAPTAIN: Yeah.

FIRST OFFICER: Honolulu Center Continental One Heavy, did you want us to turn left did you say?

RADIO: Continental One Heavy affirmative.

FIRST OFFICER: Turning now.

CAPTAIN: I can’t get any oxygen.

FLIGHT ENGINEER: What do you want me to do now?

VOICE UNIDENTIFIED: [expletive]

FIRST OFFICER: You okay?

CAPTAIN: Yeah.

FIRST OFFICER: Are you getting oxygen? We’re not getting any oxygen.

FLIGHT ENGINEER: No I’m not getting oxygen either.

The blast had torn out the oxygen supply lines, an investigation later found. Only by luck did the cockpit crew maintain enough control of the plane to descend to an altitude with sufficient oxygen levels. The pilots were then able to turn back to the Honolulu airport. All eighteen crew and 328 terrified remaining passengers survived.

The lesson for pilots is complicated. If you’re jetting along at thirty thousand feet and the DOOR FWD CARGO warning light goes on, yes, eliminating the pressure differential between inside and outside to stop the door from blowing out is a very good idea, but doing it by hitting the emergency depressurization switch and leaving everyone short of oxygen is not. Instead, Boorman said, the best thing to do is to make a rapid but controlled descent to eight thousand feet or as close to it as possible. At that height, you can safely release the plane’s inside pressure—the oxygen levels at eight thousand feet are adequate for people to breathe. (It is the altitude of Aspen, Colorado, after all.) And with that, the risk of a United Airlines–style door blowout will be safely eliminated.

The DOOR FWD CARGO checklist spelled out all these steps. And Boorman stressed how carefully it was designed for a crew to use in an emergency. All of Boeing’s aviation checklists—the company issues over one hundred per year, either new or revised—are put together meticulously. Boorman’s flight operations group is a checklist factory, and the experts in it have learned a thing or two over the years about how to make the lists work.

There are good checklists and bad, Boorman explained. Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situations in which they are to be deployed. They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on.

Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything—a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps—the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.

The power of checklists is limited, Boorman emphasized. They can help experts remember how to manage a complex process or configure a complex machine. They can make priorities clearer and prompt people to function better as a team. By themselves, however, checklists cannot make anyone follow them.

I could imagine, for instance, that when the DOOR FWD CARGO warning light goes on in a cockpit, a pilot’s first instinct might not be to grab the checklist book. How many times, after all, does a flashing warning light end up being a false alarm? The flight would likely have been going smoothly. No noises. No explosion. No strange thud. Just this pesky light flipping on. The ground crew already inspected the doors at the preflight check and found no problem. Besides, only 1 in 500,000 flights ever suffers an accident of any kind. So a person could be tempted to troubleshoot—maybe have someone check the circuitry before deciding