Checklist

From day one, we are all taught to use checklists for everything. When I was a student my instructor would kill me if he didn't see me using a checklist. As I have advanced in my aviation career, checklist usage is every bit as important. How many of you I wonder like I have, from time to time have hopped in an airplane without a checklist and taken off? I mean after all, kick the tires and light the fires... what could go wrong?

I recall a certain pilot who would commute from central California to a Los Angeles area airport 5 days a week. Every afternoon this pilot would go to the airplane hop right in and be airborne within 5 minutes, no checklist, no run-up and worse yet.. no preflight.

One day I confronted this pilot about the lack of preflight after watching this for several weeks. The pilot’s response to the lack of preflight was that a preflight was conducted every morning at her home airport, and she did a full run up at that time. 

The pilot never gave thought that during the 6 hour sit on the ramp that the plane could have been inadvertently hit by a fuel truck, struck by another airplane, damaged by a rock, have a spider crawl in the pitot tube etc..

It is up to us to fight complacency daily.

Please post any experiences you would like to share in the comments section.