Although it has little direct application to commercial flying...
Six years in the USAF flying C141s. Early on (circa 1976) there was an aircraft commander who surprised the rest of the crew, when, one day out in the middle of the pond he announced on the intercom, "let's run through the ditching checklist just for grins " (yes, we were certain that he didn't know anything that the rest of us didn't know about the need to run the ditching checklist at that particular moment!). It was unique because, unlike the casual approach I'd seen before, he included everybody (FE, Nav, Loadmasters), and, when we got through the checklist itself, made a point of asking, "now, what would you add to that checklist? What are you going to do that the Air Force didn't think of when they wrote this thing?" The one that sticks in my head was the loadmaster saying that, given three or four minutes of free time, he'd string a series of 5000 pound straps from the handle of the flight deck ladder to the rear of the airplane to give the flight deck crew something to follow through the aircraft to the rear, should that be the only way out. This use of forebrain by the loadmaster sparked imagination among others on the crew who then contributed, and we all learned something. What's more, the rest of that trip we worked better as a crew. That was the point.
Again, this isn't radically different from other informal emergency procedure reviews I've seen throughout the years, and it certainly isn't very exciting, but it sticks with me. It reminded me that, although checklists are there for a reason, you shouldn't take solace in SOP and put your brain on automatic (although I probably am not expressing this very well...). It's something I've handed down to others as well.
Of course, it's probably difficult to drag all of the flight attendants away from crowd control to have them participate in a ditiching drill...
Dave
