Old Habits die hard

First off I want to apologize for the absence. I've been trying to stay busy with work and finishing up school. Secondly, I've decided to go away from my multi part posts and talk about some other things. I've had a lot of good things come up lately that I am more interested in writing about then that. My plan is still to get back to it, maybe re-post all of them at the same time.

So here goes.

Pilots, in general, are very habitual. We tend to do the same things prior, during, and after each and every flight. There are many reasons for this, with the amount of tasks that we have to accomplish each flight if we were to "free ball" every flight something would be bound to go wrong.

One of the most basic ways pilot's demonstrate this is with the use of checklists. Checklists greatly improve the accuracy and performance of pilots. Sure after a while it almost becomes like second nature but you still find yourself using checklists, or verifying with your checklists. I've recently read an article on doctors now beginning to use checklists for surgeries. The study showed that doctors who use the checklists have, in general terms, better surgeries. There are less mistakes, deaths, and infections with doctors using versus doctors not using checklists.

I had a perfect example of "old habit's die hard" just the other week. I was flying with a Stage Check student who just needed to do two landings to complete the stage. The weather wasn't the best, 4 miles visibility and light snow.

Because of the weather we were the only aircraft(other than the King Air) flying at that point, in fact every other aircraft was parked in a hanger. As the student ran through his preflight and before starts he used his checklists as required.

When we got to the engine start, he opened his window, visually cleared left, center, and right then proceeded to yell out the window "CLEAR PROP!" before engaging the starter.

This is when it hit me! There is ABSOLUTELY no one around, no danger to people or property near the aircraft, and possibly no reason for him to yell "clear prop". However, this is something that is shoved into our heads from flight #1. The prop will kill if you walk into it, you have to make sure the prop is clear.

Now if the student hadn't verbally cleared the prop area, there probably wouldn't have been any damage. It would, however, have taken him out of his natural routine and possibly messed up the whole flight.

Moral of the story, don't change things that work. Don't change your routine to save time or because you don't think the situation requires you do a certain thing. Professional, good pilots have put years and years into training and using checklists. Professional, good pilots will use checklists until the day they retire, or heaven forbid kill themselves not using a checklists



Rightseatpilot