While I was waiting for my plane to arrive, I was sitting by the airfield and watched the skydivers come down. They circled slowly, but as they got closer to the ground, they suddenly accelerated and seemingly lost control. Only at the last second they turned around their parachute and landed safely.
There was someone else watching the skydivers. She was a girl of maybe 20, eating tacos. Next to her, a pair of crutches. “Did you get those skydiving?” I asked. She shook her head. “Basejumping.”
Finally, my plane arrived. It was a four-seat Cessna with a single engine. John, the pilot, was around 70 years old, and he had been flying planes his whole life. His father had been a flight instructor, and he had his private pilot license when he was 16. Later he had joined the Air Force and became a flight instructor himself, training their pilots. He had also spent some time flying commercial planes. Now, in retirement, he shared a plane with five other guys. I got to ride with him since I was visiting the area and was his friend’s friend.
John gave me a short briefing on the route and then we got into the plane’s cabin. There, he went through his pre-flight checklist, despite it being a small plane and him having more experience than most pilots. This reminded me of one of my favorite non-fiction books: The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. Gawande noticed that while pilots have checklists for everything and follow them, surgeons rarely do the same. As a result, air travel accidents have fallen drastically, while surgical errors remain stubbornly high. There’s something about medical culture that resists the use of checklists. I have seen the same thing in other fields that I’m familiar with, most notably business development deal making in the biotech sector. These deals ressemble each other enough that they’d benefit from checklists, but they’re never applied. Instead, we have to rely on the knowledge of what is required to do due diligence living in peoples’ heads, leading to oversights that frequently lead to bad decisions.
John and I flew over the forests and lakes. Eventually he landed the Cessna. After leaving the plane, I watched one of the larger, twin-prop planes that carried the skydivers being refueled. The pilot drove the plane up to the station, and another guy jumped out as soon as it was stationary. He then got the nozzle and refueled the plane with the spinning props just three feet from his head. When I pointed this out to John, he shook his head. They were clearly ignoring their checklist.
Nehaveigur 