Design Guidance for Emergency and Abnormal Checklists in Aviation

Abstract

It can be extremely challenging to develop effective checklists for use by flight crews during emergency and abnormal situations. Relatively little guidance is available from the human factors community and developers generally use aircraft system requirements, historical precedent, and their own best judgment to guide their design decisions. Through work at the NASA Ames Research Center, a model of emergency and abnormal checklist design, content, and use has been developed. This comprehensive model identifies all aspects that need to be considered and brings attention to some that are often unappreciated in emergency and abnormal checklist design (e.g., human performance limitations under stress).