Two thoughts:
My dad taught me to ride motorcycles, and we rode together often during my formative years. As an inexperienced rider, I often got butterflies before and during a ride–Dekker’s chronic uneasiness. It’s not a particularly comfortable feeling, and I asked my Dad once how long it took before it went away. “Son,” he said, “the day I stop feeling that way before riding is the day I stop riding.” It was a perfect answer that’s stuck with me my entire life; I still ride motorcycles today nearly 50 years later, and the butterflies are still with me.
Regarding the Gulfstream crash at Bedford, MA in 2014, it’s especially poignant that this tragedy resulted from a failure to use a checklist. The first B-17 prototype, known as the Model 299, crashed in October of 1935, killing two of the five occupants. The pilot lost control of the aircraft because he failed to remove the gust lock prior to takeoff. The event almost destroyed Boeing as an aviation company–it had bet all its resources on the B-17, and critics began to think the aircraft was too complex to be operated safely. But out of that tragedy was born an idea that has saved countless lives. A group of Boeing engineers and pilots devised a checklist for pilots to use as a memory aid. Boeing built another 12 aircraft, and its pilots, aided by checklists, flew nearly 2 million miles without incident. This ultimately convinced the U.S. government that despite its complexity, the B-17 could be safely operated by ordinary pilots. As we know, checklist use became mandatory for military aviators, and was soon adopted and mandated by professional commercial operators as well.
How sad then that a test crew elected not to use a checklist, thereby repeating nearly 80 years later the very same tragedy that prompted its creation.