Pre-flight check: the 10-item list

A pre-flight check is not a ritual, it is a list. Rituals get skipped; lists get counted. The 10 items below are done in the same order on every flight and said in the same order. The order matters: a sequence that has become habit tells you where you were when your attention wandered.

Before walking to launch

1. Reserve: pins and handle. Pins seated, handle secured and findable by hand. Look before you put the harness on; you cannot see it afterwards.

2. Harness: leg straps, chest strap. Leg straps are the most often skipped and the most lethal item. Buckle them, then pull on them by hand. Chest strap at the width the manufacturer gives.

3. Carabiners: locked. Both carabiners closed and the lock turned. A half-closed carabiner looks closed to the eye; check with a finger.

4. Helmet: buckled. A helmet on your head is not enough, the buckle must be closed. In a ground impact an unbuckled helmet comes off.

After laying out the wing

5. Lines: clear. Every row from A to brake separated, no knots, no grass or twigs caught. Walk along the leading edge lifting the lines as you go.

6. Risers: untwisted. No turn in the risers from carabiner to wing. One twist takes the brake line round with it.

7. Brake handles: in hand, line free. Handles through the pulleys, brake line not wrapped around other lines, knot sound. Pull each handle and watch the trailing edge move.

Looking at the air

8. Wind: direction, speed, steadiness. Is the wind onto launch, inside the site's limits, changing in the last minutes? Grass on the ground and the other wings at launch are the most honest gauges. If unsure, wait; the pilot who waits is never wrong.

9. Launch and airspace: clear and allowed. Your launch corridor is empty, no wing approaching above, no restriction or NOTAM active for the site.

10. Instrument: recording. Vario on, GPS locked, recording started. A log that starts after launch loses the most important minutes of the flight; the data quality report shows this as "recording started late" but cannot recover them.

The last look: right before launch

Before lifting the wing, a five-second last look is the summary of the list. Five words:

Straps, carabiners, helmet, lines, wind.

On each word, look at or touch that part. It takes five seconds; it saves not a flight but a season.

Why the list must be written down

Experienced pilots "already know" the list, and that is exactly why they skip it. Most leg-strap accidents happen not to first-season pilots but to those with hundreds of flights. A list trusts the sequence, not memory. A card stuck to the harness or a note on the phone's lock screen beats memory.

After the flight

The flight log confirms one item after the fact: that recording began before launch and ended after landing. In the IGC file there should be a few minutes between the first line's time and the moment of launch. If it is zero, you did item 10 after launch, not before.