The Checklist Manifesto_ How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande [51]
He started the engines, and although there were no actual engines, you could hear them rev up, and we had to talk louder to be heard above them. Before taxiing out to the runway, we paused again for five more checks: whether anti-icing was necessary and completed, the autobrakes were set, the flight controls were checked, the ground equipment was cleared, and no warning lights were on.
The three checklists took no time at all—maybe thirty seconds each—plus maybe a minute for the briefing. The brevity was no accident, Boorman said. People had spent hours watching pilots try out early versions in simulators, timing them, refining them, paring them down to their most efficient essentials.
When he was satisfied that we were ready, he had me pull out of the gate. I was supposed to be the pilot for this flight, believe it or not. He directed me to push the pedal brake down hard with two feet to release it. I felt a jolt as the plane lurched forward. I controlled the direction of the nose wheel with a tiller on my left—a spinning metal handle that I wound forward to turn right and backward to turn left—and the speed with the throttle controls, three levers in the center console. I weaved like a sot at first but got the hang of it by the time we reached the runway. I throttled back down to idle and locked the brake with both feet to wait our turn for takeoff. Boorman called up the Before Takeoff checklist.
“Flaps,” he said.
“Set,” I said.
This was getting to be fun. We got notification from the control tower that we were cleared. I unlocked the brakes, again. Boorman showed me how far to push the throttle. We began accelerating down the runway, slowly at first, and then it felt like we were rocketing. I pressed the right and left rudder pedals to try to keep us on the center line. Then, when he gave me the word, I pulled back on the yoke—what I’d thought of as the steering wheel—and felt the plane lift into the air. I don’t know how the simulator does it, but it really did seem like we were airborne.
We rose into the clouds. I could see the city fall away below us. We slowly climbed to twenty thousand feet. And that was when the DOOR FWD CARGO light went on. I’d forgotten that this was the whole point of the exercise. The first couple lines of the electronic checklist came up on the screen, but I grabbed the paper one just so I could see the whole thing laid out.
It was, I noticed, a READ-DO checklist—read it and do it—with only seven lines. The page explained that the forward cargo door was not closed and secure and that our objective was to reduce the risk of door separation.
This was just a simulation, I knew perfectly well. But I still felt my pulse picking up. The checklist said to lower the cabin pressure partially. Actually, what it said was, “LDG ALT selector”—which Boorman showed me is the cabin pressure control on the overhead panel—“PULL ON and set to 8000.” I did as instructed.
Next, the checklist said to descend to the lowest safe altitude or eight thousand feet, whichever is higher. I pushed forward on the yoke to bring the nose down. Boorman indicated the gauge to watch, and after a few minutes we leveled off at eight thousand feet. Now, the checklist said, put the air outflow switches on manual and push them in for thirty seconds to release the remaining pressure. I did this, too. And that was it. The plane didn’t explode. We were safe. I wanted to give Boorman a high five. This flying thing is easy, I wanted to say.
There were, however, all kinds of steps that the checklist had not specified—notifying the radio control tower that we had an emergency, for example, briefing the flight attendants, determining the safest nearby airport to land and have the cargo door inspected. I hadn’t done any of these yet. But Boorman had. The omissions were intentional, he explained. Although these are critical steps, experience had shown that professional pilots virtually never fail to perform them when necessary. So they didn’t need to be on the checklist—and in fact, he argued, shouldn’t be there.
It is common