Flight School
Core· 3 min read

Punish yourself with redundancy

For the handful of items that kill you, repeating the check is a feature, not a smell.

Good checklist hygiene says don't repeat yourself, because it trains skimming. That rule has exactly one exception, and it's the important one: the killer items. For those, repeating yourself is the whole point.

A pilot once tried to take off without the 10 degrees of flaps his airplane needs. Now "check flaps 10°" shows up in a few places in his flow: Departure Preparation, the lineup, the memorized sweep. If one catch fails, the next one gets it. He'd rather be annoyed three times than wrong once.