ORIGIN OF THE CHECKLIST
In October 30, 1935, at Wright Air
Field in Dayton, Ohio, the U.S. Army
Air Corps held a flight competition for
aircraft manufacturers vying to build
its next-generation long-range bomber.
It wasn’t supposed to be much of a
competition. In early evaluations, the Boeing Corporation’s
gleaming aluminum-alloy Model 299 had trounced the
designs of Martin and Douglas. Boeing’s plane could carry five
times as many bombs as the Army had requested; it could
fly faster than previous bombers, and almost twice as far.
A Seattle newspaperman who had glimpsed the plane called
it the “flying fortress.” The name stuck. The flight
“competition,” according to the military historian Phillip
Meilinger, was regarded as a mere formality. The Army planned
to order at least sixty-five of the aircraft.
A small crowd of Army brass and manufacturing executives
watched as the Model 299 test plane taxied onto the runway. It
was sleek and impressive, with a hundred-and-three-foot wingspan
and four engines jutting out from the wings, rather than the usual
two. The plane roared down the tarmac, lifted off smoothly and
climbed sharply to three hundred feet. Then it stalled, turned on
one wing and crashed in a fiery explosion. Two of the five crew
members died, including the pilot, Major Ployer P. Hill (thus Hill
AFB , Ogden, UT ).
An investigation revealed that nothing mechanical had gone
wrong. The crash had been due to “pilot error,” the report said.
Substantially more complex than previous aircraft, the new plane
required the pilot to attend to the four engines, a retractable landing
gear, new wing flaps, electric trim tabs that needed adjustment
to maintain control at different airspeeds, and constant-speed
propellers whose pitch had to be regulated with hydraulic controls,
among other features.
While doing all this, Hill had forgotten to release a new locking
mechanism on the elevator and rudder controls. The Boeing
model was deemed, as a newspaper put it, “too much aircraft for
one man to fly.” The Army Air Corps declared Douglas’s smaller
design the winner. Boeing nearly went bankrupt.
Still, the Army purchased a few aircraft from Boeing as test planes,
and some insiders remained convinced that the aircraft was flyable.
So a group of test pilots got together and considered what to do.
They could have required Model 299 pilots to undergo more
training. But it was hard to imagine having more experience and
expertise than Major Hill, who had been the U.S. Army Air Corps’
Chief of Flight Testing. Instead, they came up with an ingeniously
simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist, with step-by-step
checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. Its mere existence
indicated how far aeronautics had advanced.
In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might
have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a
checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than
to a driver backing a car out of the garage... But this new plane was
too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however
expert.
With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model
299 a total of 18 million miles without one accident. The Army
ultimately ordered almost thirteen thousand. They
dubbed it the B-17.
(From the Royal Victorian Aero Club's newsletter PLANE TALK Dec 2012)