Training and Safety Tip: Checklist items to remember

Setting words in italics, bold, or a combination of both type styles is often a signal that the words are deemed particularly important, but it’s not that way in aviation. Please forget everything you ever learned in your life about interpreting type styles now that you are in flight training. On aviation checklists, bold items don’t mean that you should pay more attention—they mean: Commit this to memory.

But there are two problems. The first is that this helpful information is oddly tucked away not in the definitions; explanations; or symbols, abbreviations, and terminology section at the beginning of the POH, nor in the preamble text in the emergency section; rather it’s in a hard-to-find location between the list of emergency airspeeds and the engine failure checklists. And the second problem is that most students don’t read the POH, anyway…sigh.

Some Piper POHs, and the newer Cirrus POHs, use boxes instead of bold face type, but boxed or bold, these are memory items—tasks so time-critical in an emergency that there’s simply no time to find the checklist and read it. Instead, you need to accomplish those tasks from memory. Then, and only then, do you pull out the checklist, check to ensure your memorization is on par with your flying skills, and complete the remaining items.

How many items do you need to memorize? It varies. Some checklists only have one bold item. Most emergency checklists have three or four. The Cessna model 172S engine fire checklist has a whopping 10 memory items. But I think you can see that, when you are dealing with a fire, you can’t take the time to read a checklist.

Here’s the thing: While there generally aren’t that many things to memorize on each list, there are a lot of checklists. So, one key to becoming a good pilot is to take some time each and every day to review the checklists and start committing bold text to memory.