In the early days of aviation, it became clear that flight operations — particularly cockpit procedures — needed to be standardized and documented to enhance safety. So the industry pioneered the checklist, a standardized work-instruction document for aircraft flight crews and maintenance technicians to perform tasks in accordance with a clearly defined sequence of steps designed to ensure that necessary tasks are not skipped or forgotten. Considerable gains in safety have been achieved by the standardization of procedures in flight operations and the monitoring of other line personnel that is enabled by the use of a checklist system.
Checklists now are being used in other aviation domains where standardization is desirable, such as ground handling, and in other industries and disciplines, such as medicine, that are characterized by heavy workloads, a small tolerance for error and the handling of sophisticated equipment. Also, new trends in checklist development have emerged, in…
