Flight - Lesson One
- Checklists and Flight Safety -

"If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got."

About Checklists:

What's a Checklist? It's simply a piece of paper with all the tasks the pilots must execute in a given situation (e.g. engine startup, shutdown, takeoff, climb, descend, landing, decompression, engine failure) printed on it.

Checklists are very important for Flight Safety, because flying is a very complicated process. Trying to keep tons of metal wires and people in the air while reading maps and communicating with Air Traffic Controllers put a huge workload on the air crew. With so much on your mind it's very easy to forget what you are supposed to be doing and when. That's where the Checklist comes in. It's simply a list of things that must be completed, in order and when it must be done. You can fly the best flight but forget one little thing and it could mess up your whole day.

A perfect example of this happened just a few miles from my house. A pilot flying a Cessna with retractable gear was coming in for landing. Perfect approach, proper altitude and turns at the correct time. Everything was going great until his prop chewed into the asphalt. Seems he always flew a Cessna with non-retractable gear. He didn't follow the checklist and didn't extend his gear. Scratch one Cessna, not to mention the damage to the airstrip.

EMD Checklists:

Emerald Air provides Checklists for each aircraft in the Emerald Air fleet. Our Checklists cover all the situations you will meet during a normal flight from startup to shutdown. There's a reason Checklists are provided. It is to help you, the pilot, remember what you have to do to complete a perfect flight (or pretty darn close to it). Remember: real airline pilots with hundreds of hours flight time use Checklists every time they fly. So should you.

Emerald Air Checklists are based on real-world Boeing 737 Checklists and Procedures. These Checklists, however, have been optimized for MSFS2000 / 2002 aircraft and panels that you can download from our Home Page. Minute details with regard to the operation of real aircraft systems have thus been omitted and the Checklists have been restructured for easier use.

Some helpful hints:

• Have someone read off the list to you for each portion of your flight.
• Print a new checklist for each flight and mark off every item as you complete it.
• Annotate the SIM commands alongside each item. That way you're not struggling to remember the correct keystrokes.