How to Choose the Right Aviation Checklist for Your Airplane

Hey 👋 I’m Otto — private pilot, long-time graphic designer, and the bald bloke behind EZ Copilot ✈️. I started this whole thing for a very unglamorous reason: I wanted an aviation checklist that felt like it belonged in a real cockpit. Not something that looked “official” on a desk, but something I could read quickly, keep my place on, and trust when the workload got busy. Friends kept asking for copies, then friends of friends did, and that personal project turned into thousands of checklists in cockpits around the world.

Now, a quick but important note before we get rolling: checklists are a high-exposure topic. I’m going to keep this post in the safe lane on purpose. This is not flight instruction, it’s not “do this during an emergency,” and it’s not a replacement for your aircraft’s POH/AFM. Think of this as a guide for how to evaluate a checklist as a tool—so your checklist supports your flying instead of becoming one more thing that gets in your way.

Why Your Aviation Checklist Is More Than Paperwork

A pilot checklist is not there to impress an examiner or to make your flight bag look professional. The real job of a checklist is much quieter: it reduces your mental workload and helps you maintain consistency when the cockpit gets noisy. Even excellent pilots—especially excellent pilots—are still human. We get interrupted, we get distracted, we get tired, and we sometimes assume we “already did that.” A good aviation checklist can catch those small slips before they turn into a bigger issue.

Here’s the weird thing: pilots often choose checklists the same way they choose a pen. Whatever was nearby, whatever someone handed them, whatever came with the airplane. But the difference is that a pen won’t influence your cockpit discipline the way a checklist will. If your checklist is cramped, confusing, or hard to read, you will naturally start skipping it. That’s not a moral failure—it’s basic human behavior. When a tool is frustrating, we avoid it. The goal is to choose a checklist that you will actually use, consistently, because it is easy to use.

The Three Main Types of Pilot Checklists

Most GA pilots end up with some mix of three checklist formats: the factory/POH checklist, a paper or laminated card, and a digital/EFB-based checklist. Each has legitimate strengths, and each has predictable drawbacks. Instead of treating this like “paper vs digital,” it helps to think in terms of roles: which one is your primary cockpit tool, and which one is your reference or backup.

Factory Booklet and POH Checklists

Your POH/AFM is the authoritative source for procedures and limitations, and it’s the baseline reference for anything checklist-related. If you want to understand what a step is doing and why it matters, the POH is where you go. It’s also where the legally relevant phrasing and sequence will live for many aircraft, depending on what’s approved and how your airplane is configured.

The catch is that POH checklists often aren’t optimized for fast scanning in a moving cockpit. They can be dense, they can be small-print, and emergency information can be spread across multiple pages. That doesn’t make the POH wrong—far from it. It simply means the POH is usually best as your reference standard on the ground, and many pilots prefer something more cockpit-friendly as their day-to-day tool.

Laminated Aviation Checklist Cards

Laminated cards are popular because they are simple, durable, and consistent. You can organize content by phases of flight, place the checklist in the same spot every time, and build a rhythm around it. A good laminated checklist can reduce the “search tax” of hunting for the next item, because you can glance at it quickly and get your eyes back outside.

When a laminated checklist is done well, it’s not “less professional” than a booklet. It’s more usable in real conditions. The key is that it should still be rooted in the POH/AFM for your specific aircraft, and it should not encourage improvisation or “creative procedures.” It should be a practical cockpit surface for the same underlying manufacturer procedures—presented in a way that respects human factors like glance time, cockpit lighting, and interruptions.

If you’re curious, this is the role EZ Copilot is designed to fill: a durable, cockpit-friendly checklist built from the POH for specific make/model variants, with layout choices that prioritize speed and readability. If you want to see what models are available, you can browse them here: EZ Copilot Shop.

Digital and EFB-Based Checklists

Digital checklists can be extremely useful—especially for study, standardization across devices, and keeping a personal “notes” layer for your flying. Many pilots already live inside an EFB for charts, weather, NOTAMs, and planning, so adding a checklist can feel like a natural extension.

But digital checklists can also compete with everything else your tablet is doing. Notifications, glare, screen dimming, battery issues, device overheating, and simple touch input quirks are all very real. That doesn’t mean a digital checklist is bad. It just means many pilots prefer a physical checklist as the primary in-cockpit tool and keep digital as the flexible supplement. You’re allowed to be redundant in aviation—sometimes redundancy is the whole point.

How to Evaluate Any Aviation Checklist in Five Minutes

If you want a checklist you can trust, don’t start with “what brand should I buy.” Start with a quick evaluation. This approach works whether you’re looking at a POH insert, a laminated card, or a digital list. The goal is not perfection. The goal is to reduce friction and increase reliability.

1) Source Alignment: Does It Clearly Track the POH/AFM?

The safest question you can ask is also the simplest: where did this checklist come from? A trustworthy aircraft checklist should clearly reflect the manufacturer’s procedures for your exact model and configuration. You do not need to see a citation on every line, but you should be able to reasonably tell that the checklist is not generic filler. If the checklist reads like it was written for “a typical airplane,” be cautious. Aircraft variants matter.

2) Phase Structure: Is It Organized the Way You Fly?

Strong checklists have predictable phases. Preflight, before start, start, taxi, run-up, before takeoff, climb, cruise, descent, before landing, after landing, shutdown. That structure is not just for aesthetics. It helps you resume after interruptions, and it reduces the chance that you accidentally skip an entire set of items because they were buried in a long block of text.

If your checklist is essentially one big paragraph of steps, it’s going to feel fine at home and annoying at the hold short line. The more your checklist supports “scan, do, confirm,” the more likely you are to use it the way it’s intended.

3) Readability: Can You Read It at Arm’s Length in Bright Light?

This test is brutally effective. Hold your checklist at arm’s length and imagine cockpit lighting—bright sun, sunglasses, and a glance that lasts maybe a second. Can you see section headers instantly? Do items have enough spacing? Is the font large enough to avoid squinting? If the answer is no, that checklist becomes friction, and friction leads to avoidance.

This is where design is not decoration. Typography, spacing, and hierarchy aren’t about looking pretty. They are about reducing errors by making the right information easy to find fast. If you have to hunt for your place, you are already behind.

4) Cockpit Flow: Does the Order Match Your Hands?

We all have flows. You might do a left-to-right scan, or top-to-bottom, or “panel then engine controls then lights.” A checklist that fights your natural movement creates stops and starts. One that complements your flow feels smoother and reduces the urge to “just do it from memory.”

This is also why I don’t love the idea of a checklist that tries to be a training manual. In flight, you want concise, action-oriented steps grouped the way you actually work through the cockpit—not a wall of explanatory text.

5) Emergency Access: Can You Find the Critical Stuff Quickly?

I’m going to keep this intentionally general for safety and legal reasons: you should always follow the POH/AFM for your aircraft and your training for abnormal and emergency procedures. That said, the usability principle is fair: in a high-stress moment, your ability to search drops. So your checklist format should make it easy to locate the right section without hunting across multiple pages or menus.

Many pilots prefer emergency/abnormal content to be placed in a predictable location (often consolidated in one place, such as the back side of a card). The more predictable the layout is, the more quickly you can access the information you need during training and practice—which is where you want to build those habits anyway.

Match the Checklist to Your Flying, Not the Other Way Around

Choosing the right aviation checklist is not only about the aircraft. It’s about your typical missions and where your workload spikes. A pilot who flies short local hops in a busy training pattern has a different rhythm than a pilot doing long IFR cross-countries. A great checklist supports the places you tend to get rushed: the run-up area, the before takeoff moment, the descent setup, and the after landing cleanup when everyone is talking again.

If you tend to get interrupted, choose a checklist that makes restarting easy. If you fly in bright sun, choose one that is readable at a glance. If your cockpit is tight, choose something physically manageable. These are simple principles, but they make a real difference because they determine whether the checklist becomes a habit or a nuisance.

Where EZ Copilot Fits Into a Practical Checklist System

EZ Copilot exists because I wanted a primary checklist that feels natural in a GA cockpit: readable, durable, and organized around real human use. Each card is built from the aircraft’s POH, then refined for clarity and speed. The goal is not to replace your POH. The goal is to make “doing it right” easier in the cockpit.

Also, I’ll say this plainly: if you already have a checklist system that is accurate, readable, and easy to use under pressure, keep using it. I’m not here to convince you that every other checklist is garbage. But if your current setup is a faded photocopy, a cramped booklet you avoid, or a digital checklist that competes with everything else your tablet is doing, it might be worth trying a purpose-built laminated option. You can browse the full lineup here: EZ Copilot Shop, or jump to manufacturers like Cessna and Piper.

Simple Next Step Before Your Next Flight

Before your next trip to the airport, grab the checklist you actually use and run the quick evaluation from this post: source alignment, phase structure, readability, cockpit flow, and emergency access. You don’t need a perfect checklist. You need a checklist that helps you be consistent when things get busy.

If the evaluation shows that your checklist is working well, great—keep flying it. If it shows friction points, consider upgrading or simplifying. Your checklist is one of the few pieces of gear that can reduce workload on every flight you ever fly in that airplane. That’s a pretty good return on effort.