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Pilots nonetheless turn to their checklists for two reasons. First, they are trained to do so. They learn from the beginning of flight school that their memory and judgment are unreliable and that lives depend on their recognizing that fact. Second, the checklists have proved their worth—they work. However much pilots are taught to trust their procedures more than their instincts, that doesn’t mean they will do so blindly. Aviation checklists are by no means perfect. Some have been found confusing or unclear or flawed. Nonetheless, they have earned pilots’ faith. Face-to-face with catastrophe, they are astonishingly willing to turn to their checklists.

In the cockpit voice recorder transcript of the United flight from Honolulu, for example, the pilots’ readiness to rely on procedure is striking. The circumstances were terrifying. Debris was flying. The noise was tremendous. Their hearts were probably racing. And they had a lot to focus on. Beyond the immediate oxygen problem, ejected sections of fuselage had flown into engine No. 3, on the right wing, and disabled it. Additional debris had hit engine No. 4 and set it on fire. The outer-edge wing flaps had been damaged. And sitting up front, trying to figure out what to do, the cockpit crew still had no idea what had really happened. They thought a bomb had gone off. They didn’t know the full extent of the damage, or whether another blast might occur. They nonetheless needed to shut down the ruined engines, notify air traffic control of the emergency, descend to a safe altitude, determine how maneuverable the plane was, sort out which alarms on their instrument panel they could ignore and which ones they couldn’t, and decide whether to ditch the plane in the ocean or return to Honolulu. The greatest test of where crew members place their trust—in their instincts or in their procedures—is how they handle such a disaster.

So what did they do? They grabbed their checklist book:

CAPTAIN: You want me to read a checklist?

FLIGHT ENGINEER: Yeah, I got it out. When you’re ready.

CAPTAIN: Ready.

There was a lot to go through, and they had to make good choices about what procedures to turn to first. Following their protocols, they reduced their altitude, got the two damaged engines shut down safely, tested the plane’s ability to land despite the wing damage, dumped fuel to lighten their load, and successfully returned to Honolulu.

To pilots, the checklists have proved worth trusting, and that is thanks to people like Boorman, who have learned how to make good checklists instead of bad. Clearly, our surgery checklist had a ways to go.

When you’re making a checklist, Boorman explained, you have a number of key decisions. You must define a clear pause point at which the checklist is supposed to be used (unless the moment is obvious, like when a warning light goes on or an engine fails). You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist. With a DO-CONFIRM checklist, he said, team members perform their jobs from memory and experience, often separately. But then they stop. They pause to run the checklist and confirm that everything that was supposed to be done was done. With a READ-DO checklist, on the other hand, people carry out the tasks as they check them off—it’s more like a recipe. So for any new checklist created from scratch, you have to pick the type that makes the most sense for the situation.

The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it to between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory. Boorman didn’t think one had to be religious on this point.

“It all depends on the context,” he said. “In some situations you have only twenty seconds. In others, you may have several minutes.”

But after about sixty to ninety seconds at a given pause point, the checklist often becomes a distraction from other things. People start “shortcutting.” Steps get missed. So you want to keep the list short by focusing on what he called “the killer items”—the steps