Babblespeak, the endless checklist

[clunckdriver]

A few years back I was tasked to select and hire pilots to fly high wing Cessnas for a major forestry project, their task was to fly above the spray aircraft with a qualified observer in the right seat and take note of spray patterns/drift and all that good stuff, as they would not go below 1000AGL it was a great chance for some newbies to make some very good coin as well as gain about 600hrs PIC. The selection flights were simple, show me a short/rough field TO, complete a power of landing onto a local grass strip, and navigate to a point in the bush using only the photo used by the spray pilots, nothing trickey at all. I could just not belive the endless babling these kids had been taught at some of our Government run schools, from start up to shut down it sounded like there were a flock of bloody parrots on board, it took some time to de program these kids but in the end all was well, and piece and quiet returned to the cockpits, where is this leading? I recently sat next to another pilot just hired into a turbo prop outfit, during our chat he produced the "Normall Checklist" his new employer is using, dear God, the space Shuttle check list is only one quarter the lenght of this incredible thing, when asked how the hell did he manage to fly the aircraft and listen to ATC, his reply was, "We try, but do seem to miss a lot of calls". Question, am I the only one who finds that there are those out there who seem to be trying to make a fairly simple job sound bloody complicated? I think the final word on this should go to Col Chuck Anderson, for those not in the know he was the lead test pilot for the whole B52 series, and I quote."Im indebted to SAC for one thing, they gave me the incentive to retire,when I first started on the B52 the pilots checklist was on one side of a five by seven card, the co pilots on the other, in SAC the normall checklist was fourty two pages!" Its worth noting, that TC has the longest King Air checklists but manage to land gear up with great regularity, after I got home I dug out my collection of checklists, not one of them came close to the size of the one shown to me by this F/O, and these aircraft were untill recently about as big as you could buy,any comments/observations on my rant?