The competition was supposed to be a formality. In the autumn of 1935, the US Army Air Corps was choosing its next long-range bomber, and Boeing’s Model 299 had already outclassed the designs from Martin and Douglas. It could carry five times the bomb load the Army had asked for. It had four engines where most bombers had two. The Army planned to buy at least 65.
On October 30, at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, a small crowd of officers and executives watched it take off. It climbed to about 300 feet. Then it stalled, turned on one wing and crashed in a fireball. Four of the five men aboard crawled out of the wreckage. The pilot, Major Ployer P. Hill, and Boeing’s chief test pilot, Leslie Tower, died of their injuries.
The investigating board ruled out structural failure, a control malfunction and design faults. It named the direct cause as the elevator control being locked. The Model 299 had a new lock on its elevator and rudder controls, and Hill had not released it before takeoff.
A newspaper put the verdict in one line: “too much airplane for one man to fly.” The Army declared Douglas’s smaller design the winner. Boeing nearly went bankrupt.
Even so, the Army ordered 13 of the planes for testing, and some insiders still believed the Model 299 could be flown. The question was how. Hill was no beginner. He had been the Air Corps’ chief of flight testing. If he could miss a step, anyone could, and more training would not change that. So a group of test pilots wrote the steps down: checks for takeoff, flight, landing and taxiing.
According to Gawande, pilots using the checklist went on to fly the Model 299 1.8 million miles without an accident. It became the prototype for 12,730 B-17s, the Flying Fortress of the Second World War.