Scudrunners

Colonel wrote:Does a checklist make a bad pilot a good pilot?

My opinion: Yes.  Yes it does.

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.

We all started out as bad pilots

Correct - if you define "bad" as lacking in
knowledge and skill.

I probably lack your aviation experience - I
have only been flying for over 40 years - but
in my lifetime I have observed a strong
correlation:  The better and more experienced
a pilot, the less likely he is to use a checklist.

Chuck, Bob, Clunkdriver, Doc, my father - all
unbelievably experienced pilots, all with
incredible safety records, and not a checklist
in sight.  Anywhere.

I know that messing with someone's religion
does not exactly promote happiness - watch
any of Christopher Hitchen's videos? - but
it's the weak pilots with the massive checklists
that land gear up and have mid-air collisions.

It's just my opinion, but if you need a thick,
distracting checklist to safely fly an aircraft,
you need some more training before you are
safe to fly it.  A checklist does not make a bad
pilot a good pilot.

Again, I probably fly more types - and wildly
different types - than anyone else in Canada
that I know of, and I don't use a checklist in
any of them.  And I have a perfect safety
record.

This is impossible, according to the Checklist
Religion Fanatics.  Yet, it is so.

Mid air collisions. Some of avoiding that is luck, or Grace, or odds. Ain't much traffic around CYSH, except the combines.

Now where I fly, there is a ton of traffic, and clustered around the same altitudes.  Just north of me is the insanity called Brampton Airport, which has had at least 2 mid airs near it I can recall.

I've had a couple of near misses myself, and my head is always outside.

I get the point but it's no guarantee.  Had a guy near there radically change course behind me, never saw me, no radio calls, almost run up my a$$.  Saw him last moment, pretty close. 

Hate flying nice weekend days, for that reason.