Organize it by phase of flight, keep every section short enough to take in at a glance, flag the handful of items that hurt you when you miss them, and write each line as a confirmation rather than an instruction. Then check it against your POH. That’s the method. The rest of this is why, because a checklist built without the reasoning becomes one more PDF you never run.
Checklists exist because memory fails predictably
Memory doesn’t fail at random. It fails in patterns, and the patterns are documented. NASA’s human-factors work on this, Checklists and Monitoring in the Cockpit: Why Crucial, but Often Overlooked (NASA/TM-2010-216396), is direct about the mechanism: interruptions, task-switching, and habit patterns are what make a competent pilot skip a step they know cold.
That shapes what belongs on the page: the items most likely to get dropped under load, placed where dropping them still matters.
The evidence that they matter
The accident files back this up. The NTSB’s review of accidents and incidents involving checklist use between 1983 and 1986, summarized in the FAA’s The Use and Design of Flightcrew Checklists and Manuals (DOT/FAA/AM-91/7), found checklist misuse to be a recurring factor. In several of those cases nobody pulled the checklist out at all. In at least one, the checklist itself was part of the problem: badly designed, printed so small it worked against the crew instead of for them. AIN made the same point for business aviation in Checklist Discipline: Avoiding the Simple Stupid Stuff that Kills.
So legibility and layout aren’t cosmetic. A checklist you can’t read at arm’s length in turbulence is a checklist you won’t use.
Flow first, then check
Most people get this part backwards. In normal operations the checklist is a backup. You do the work from a practiced flow, a physical sequence you run from memory, and then read the checklist to confirm the critical items got done. AOPA covers it well in Flow, then check, and I went deeper on the split in flows first, then checklists.
The technical names are worth knowing:
- Do-Verify (DV): you complete the items in a flexible order from your flow, then read the checklist afterward to verify each was done. Use this for most normal checklists.
- Read-Do: you read each item aloud and perform it immediately, in strict order. Reserved for rare or high-stakes procedures where you have no practiced flow to fall back on.
NASA’s field observations found the most common real-world error was running a flow-check procedure as read-do instead: 48 observed instances. It’s slower, and it makes you more likely to miss an item, because your attention is buried in the paper instead of on the airplane. Boeing’s design philosophy, developed by Daniel Boorman after studying thousands of incidents and summarized in this overview of his work, lands in the same place. The checklist confirms. It doesn’t do the flying.
So write yours for verification. Short confirmation items (“Fuel selector — BOTH”) beat instructional prose every time.
Keep each section to 5–9 items
Working memory is the constraint. Boeing’s checklist guidance, in the Boeing Technical Journal checklist piece and the overview above, favors short logical chunks over one long scroll. Roughly 5 to 9 items per checkpoint: enough to be meaningful, few enough to run at a single glance.
If a phase genuinely has more, split it into sub-sections (“Before Takeoff, Runup” and “Before Takeoff, Lineup”) rather than one intimidating block. A section you can take in with one look is a section you’ll finish.
Give killer items special treatment
Items aren’t equal. Every checklist has a few that are genuinely dangerous to miss: fuel selector, mixture, flaps for the phase of flight, trim, gear if you fly something retractable. Boeing and industry guidance call these “killer items,” and the design job is keeping them from blending into the routine ones. DOT/FAA/AM-91/7 notes that the most critical items are sometimes pulled out and performed as a memorized flow “when the need arises.”
In practice you have a few tools:
- Position them where they matter. A killer item belongs at the checkpoint that still catches it in time.
- Make them visually distinct. Bold them. In an emergency section, break the memory items out into their own bordered box so they never blur into the read-and-verify steps around them.
- Repeat them across checkpoints. Re-confirming “Fuel selector — BOTH” at two different points is deliberate redundancy, and it costs you a line of paper.
Organize by phase of flight
House guidance here, not a regulatory rule, but it’s how good checklists tend to be built. Organize the document by phase so it follows the arc of the flight:
Preflight → Before Start → Before Taxi → Before Takeoff → Climb → Cruise → Descent → Before Landing → After Landing → Shutdown → Securing, with Emergency and Abnormal sections held separately.
Each phase gets its own short section, and that phase’s killer items sit where you’ll catch them. Keep the language literal and terse, challenge on the left and response on the right, so it reads the same on a kneeboard half-sheet or a trifold in the map pocket. If you fly a common trainer, the Cessna 172 checklist is already laid out this way and easier to edit than a blank page.
End every checklist the same way
Whatever you build is a memory aid derived from your aircraft’s approved documents, never a substitute for them. Cross-check every item against the current POH/AFM before you fly it, and keep the approved manual in the airplane where the regulations require it. That’s why every template on this site carries the same disclaimer.
Then print your first draft and fly with it. Mark it up in the airplane, right there on the page. The items you fumble for are the ones in the wrong place.
Common questions
How many items should each section have?
Aim for roughly 5 to 9 items per checkpoint, matching working-memory limits and Boeing's short-chunk design guidance. If a phase needs more, split it into labeled sub-sections rather than one long block.
Should emergency items be memorized?
The small number of immediate-action steps — the true memory items — yes, those are drilled and executed from memory before you consult anything, because there's no time to read. The rest of an emergency procedure is still run from the checklist. Mark memory items distinctly so they never blur into the read-and-verify steps.