There were, however, all kinds of steps that the checklist had not specified—notifying the radio control tower that we had an emergency, for example, briefing the flight attendants, determining the safest nearby airport to land and have the cargo door inspected. I hadn’t done any of these yet. But Boorman had. The omissions were intentional, he explained. Although these are critical steps, experience had shown that professional pilots virtually never fail to perform them when necessary.
