Checklists can also be used during the preflight phase, and these don t necessarily need to be of the written variety, either. A simple acronym is often sufficient to cover the essentials. For instance, before every flight you should take inventory of your psychological and physiological readiness to pilot an airplane. You can use the acronym I M SAFE to do this. Pilots using this checklist are less likely to suffer some sort of impairment that often leads or at least contributes to an accident.
Statistics show that impairment contributes to many more accidents than mechanical problems.
Please commit this checklist to memory and use it before every flight. If there is such a thing as an enemy to a pilot, then it s the pilot himself. It s a pilot s inability to deal with some very common behavioral traps that usually gets him or her into trouble. I m specifically referring to traps like always trying to complete the flight the way you planned it, trying to please your passengers, trying to meet schedules, as well as trying to demonstrate that you have the right stuff. Well, at hundreds of miles per hour, the fabled right stuff can turn you and your airplane into bent stuff.