Talk:Ployer Peter Hill

Checklists

Surgeon/author Atul Gawande, in an article calling for increased use of medical checklists, seems to say that the incident in which Hill died was the impetus for formal aviation checklists. "it was hard to imagine having more experience and expertise than Major Hill, who had been the U.S. Army Air Corps’ chief of flight testing. Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing." If this can be verified, should it be mentioned here? Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all#ixzz0i0WvvODh 24.128.188.152 (talk) 23:32, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

I agree with the previous comment. Dr Gawande's article in the New Yorker states:

They could have required Model 299 pilots to undergo more training. But it was hard to imagine having more experience and expertise than Major Hill, who had been the U.S. Army Air Corps’ chief of flight testing. Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had advanced. In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert. With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident.

I have sent Dr Gawande the following email request:

Dear Dr Gawande,

I am editing the wikipedia article about Ployer Peter Hill. Could you provide any citation information for your story that the crash of the Model 299 was the source for the army creating aviation checklists?

Phersh (talk) 05:05, 11 November 2013 (UTC)