Attended an FAA Safety seminar at the San Carlos Flight Center, presented by Jason Miller of the finer points. Jason has been evangelizing safety standards for GA pilots since the accident rates in this community is almost 500x the accident rate of commercial airline pilots. He credits the success to the rigorous use of standard operating procedures (SOP) by commercial airline pilots. Some learnings from the seminar:

• Review Part 91 accident reports and codify learnings into an SOP. GA community does not have a standardized way to disseminate the learnings across the community unlike commercial airlines.
• Do a “final walk around” after all the passengers are buckled up and before starting the engine, as a redundant check against the preflight inspection. It is possible that during the preflight inspection the state of the aircraft may have been disturbed and the final walk around guards against that. On my very first demo flight, I failed to close the oil tank door on the cowling after checking the oil level. We didn’t notice it until after starting the engine and we were ready to taxi out of the hangar.
• Abort takeoff if 70% of the rotation speed (Vr) has not been reached by the time you reach midpoint on the runway. While landing, if all the wheels haven’t touched down by the time you reach midpoint on the runway, immediately initiate a go-around. These will help eliminate preventable accidents.
• Distinguish between a “do” list and a “check” list. It is OK to run a “do” list when you are on the ground and have no other distractions. You have the freedom to read off items on the “do” list and execute them. While in the air, perform a “flow” list followed by “check” list. The idea is to mentally define a visual flow over the dashboard and scan them. Then scan the “check” list to ensure everything was covered.
• “Stay ahead of the aircraft”. Have a game plan for each stage of your flight. Run through the actions as you hit each stage of the flight and free up time to focus on flying the plane up to the next stage. Planning the actions after hitting the stage will leave less “downtime” to fly the plane and increase anxiety.
• Pre-takeoff briefing. Have a game plan before you get to takeoff for the flight. Strike up an agreement with your CFI or co-pilot on emergency preparedness, what you will accomplish on this flight, route, roles and responsibilities etc.