Atul Gawande has written persuasively in The New Yorker and in his book The Checklist Manifesto about the power of checklists. I first encountered his writing in the 2009 article “The Checklist,” 139 where he described the test flight of the Model 299, a next-generation long-range bomber developed by the Boeing Corporation in 1935. It could “carry five times as many bombs as the Army had requested … fly faster than previous bombers, and almost twice as far.” The only problem was that it crashed.
