The Checklist Manifesto_ How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande [50]
The wording should be simple and exact, Boorman went on, and use the familiar language of the profession. Even the look of the checklist matters. Ideally, it should fit on one page. It should be free of clutter and unnecessary colors. It should use both uppercase and lowercase text for ease of reading. (He went so far as to recommend using a sans serif type like Helvetica.)
To some extent, we had covered this territory in drafting our surgery checklist. No question, it needed some trimming, and many items on the list could be sharper and less confusing. I figured we could fix it easily. But Boorman was adamant about one further point: no matter how careful we might be, no matter how much thought we might put in, a checklist has to be tested in the real world, which is inevitably more complicated than expected. First drafts always fall apart, he said, and one needs to study how, make changes, and keep testing until the checklist works consistently.
This is not easy to do in surgery, I pointed out. Not in aviation, either, he countered. You can’t unlatch a cargo door in midflight and observe how a crew handles the consequences. But that’s why they have flight simulators, and he offered to show me one.
I tried not to seem like a kid who’d just been offered a chance to go up to the front of the plane and see the cockpit. Sure, I said. That sounds neat.
A short stroll later, we entered an adjacent building, walked through an ordinary-looking metal door, and came upon a strange, boxlike space capsule. It was mounted on three massive hydraulic legs. We appeared to be on a platform of some kind, as the capsule was on our level and the legs went down to the floor below. Boorman led me into the thing and inside was a complete Boeing 777-200ER cockpit. He had me climb into the captain’s seat on the left while he took the one on the right. He showed me how to belt myself in. The windshield was three black plasma screens, until an assistant turned them on.
“What airport do you want?” Boorman asked. “We’ve got almost every airport in the world loaded into the database.”
I chose the Seattle-Tacoma airport, where I’d landed the day before, and suddenly the tarmac came up on the screens. It was amazing. We were parked at a gate. Guys with baggage carts whizzed back and forth in front of me. In the distance, I could see other airplanes taxiing in and out of their gates.
Boorman walked me through our checks. Built into the wall panel on my left was a slot for the checklist book, which I could grab at any time, but it was just a backup. Pilots usually use an electronic checklist that appears on the center console. He demonstrated how one goes through it, reading from the screen.
“Oxygen,” he said and pointed to where I could confirm the supply.
“Tested, 100 percent,” I was supposed to respond. “Flight instruments,” he said, and showed me where I could find the heading and altimeter readings.
On our initial cockpit check, we had just four preflight items to review. Before starting the engines, we had six more items, plus a prompt asking us to confirm that we’d completed our “taxi and takeoff briefing”—the discussion between pilot and copilot in which they talk through their taxi and takeoff plans and concerns. Boorman went through it with me.
His plan, as far as I could follow, was to do a “normal” takeoff on Runway 16L, lift off at a whole lot of knots per hour, “fly the standard departure” to the southeast, and climb to twenty thousand feet—I think. He also said something important sounding about the radio settings. Then he mentioned a bunch of crazy stuff—like if we had an engine failure during takeoff, we would power down if we were still on the ground, continue climbing if we had one engine left, or look for a good landing site nearby if we didn’t. I nodded sagely.
“Do you have any concerns?” he asked.
“Nope,