A good checklist is not a to-do list you read top to bottom. It’s a carefully designed tool that exists because of a specific, well-documented fact about how pilots fail. If you understand that fact, building a checklist for your own aircraft becomes much less about copying someone else’s PDF and much more about designing something you’ll actually use correctly when you’re busy, distracted, or a little behind the airplane.
Checklists exist because memory fails predictably
The foundational reason checklists work is not that pilots are careless. It’s that human memory fails in predictable ways, not random ones. NASA’s human-factors research on the topic — Checklists and Monitoring in the Cockpit: Why Crucial, but Often Overlooked (NASA/TM-2010-216396) — documents this directly: interruptions, task-switching, and habit patterns all conspire to make a competent pilot skip a step they “know” perfectly well. A checklist is the mechanism that catches that predictable miss.
This matters for how you build one. You are not writing a study guide. You are building a net that catches the specific items most likely to be forgotten under load, positioned where you’ll actually run it.
The evidence that they matter
It isn’t just theory. When the NTSB reviewed 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) — it found checklist misuse to be a recurring factor. In several of those cases the checklist simply wasn’t used at all. In at least one, the checklist itself was part of the problem: it was so poorly designed and printed so small that it worked against the crew instead of for them. Business-aviation writers have made the same point bluntly in pieces like AIN’s Checklist Discipline: Avoiding the Simple Stupid Stuff that Kills.
The takeaway for a homemade checklist: legibility and layout are not cosmetic. A checklist you can’t read at arm’s length in turbulence is a checklist you won’t use.
Flow first, then check
Here’s the single most important concept, and the one most beginners get backwards. In normal operations, the checklist is a backup, not the primary way you do the task. You perform the actions from a practiced flow — a habitual, physical sequence you run from memory — and then you run the checklist to confirm the critical items were done. AOPA describes this well in Flow, then check.
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. This is how most normal checklists should be used.
- Read-Do: you read each item aloud and perform it immediately, in strict order. This is reserved for rare or high-stakes procedures where you don’t have a practiced flow to fall back on.
NASA’s field observations found that the most common real-world error was pilots running a flow-check procedure as a read-do instead — 48 observed instances in that study. That’s slower, and paradoxically it makes you more likely to miss an item on a busy checklist because your attention is buried in the paper instead of on the airplane. Boeing’s own checklist-design philosophy, developed by Daniel Boorman after studying thousands of incidents and summarized in this overview of his work, points in the same direction: the checklist confirms; it doesn’t replace airmanship.
So when you build your checklist, build it to be verified, not performed. Short, confirmation-oriented items (“Fuel selector — BOTH”) beat long instructional prose.
Keep each section to 5–9 items
Working memory is limited, and checklist design has to respect that. Boeing’s checklist guidance, described in the Boeing Technical Journal checklist piece and the summary linked above, recommends short lists broken into logical chunks rather than one long scroll. A practical rule of thumb is 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 items than that, break it into sub-sections (“Before Takeoff — Runup,” “Before Takeoff — Lineup”) rather than one intimidating block. A section you can take in with one look is a section you’ll actually complete.
Give killer items special treatment
Not all items are equal. Every checklist has a handful of items that are genuinely dangerous to miss — fuel selector position, mixture, flaps set for the phase of flight, trim, gear if you fly something retractable. Boeing and industry guidance call these “killer items,” and the design goal is to make sure they don’t blend into the routine ones. DOT/FAA/AM-91/7 discusses these directly, noting 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 catches it in time.
- Make them visually distinct. Bold them, or in an emergency section, break them out as memory items in their own bordered box so they never get lost in the read-and-verify items around them.
- Repeat them across checkpoints. It’s fine — encouraged, even — to re-confirm “Fuel selector — BOTH” at more than one point. Redundancy is the whole idea.
Organize by phase of flight
This next part is house guidance, not a regulatory rule — but it’s how good checklists tend to be structured. Organize the whole thing by phase of flight, so the checklist mirrors the actual arc of your 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, each section fits in a glance, and the killer items for that phase live where you’ll catch them. Keep the language literal and terse — challenge on the left, response on the right — so it reads cleanly whether it’s on a kneeboard half-sheet or a trifold in the map pocket.
End every checklist the same way
However carefully you build it, a checklist you made is a memory aid derived from your aircraft’s approved documents — never a replacement for them. Cross-check every item against your aircraft’s current POH/AFM before you fly it, and keep the approved manual in the airplane where the regulations require it.
That’s the honest bottom line, and it’s why every template on this site carries the same disclaimer. Build something clean, chunk it, protect the killer items, organize it by phase — and then verify it against the real book.
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.