My opinion: Yes. Yes it does.Colonel wrote:Does a checklist make a bad pilot a good pilot?
Put away your pitch forks and hear me out.
We all started out as bad pilots. There's nothing wrong with that, we were just in it to learn and we did but the reality is we all started from zero. We learned that outside of the coordination and balance we had to develop to steer the plane through the sky, there was a sequence of things you had to do either to ensure safety or to prepare the plane for the next thing you did. Sometimes these things would be pulled from a book, sometimes they were placarded somewhere in the cockpit or sometimes we just had the sequence drilled into us until we knew it. To further reinforce the what, we learned the why for these things. Call these sequences what you like: flows, checklists, or I just use the blanket term 'checks' but they're all the same in that they get the plane ready for the next thing you're going to do and learning them (and understanding why) made us better.
Whether or not they're on paper is irrelevant and really varies with the situation (although too long can be problematic), the idea behind them is the same: do these things for success.
It's not magic and it won't make an uncaring tool brilliant but then again it's not as black-and-white as the shit disturbers make it out to be either.
