On October 30, 1935, Boeing’s Model 299 bomber crashed at Wright Field, Ohio. The board blamed “the elevator control being locked.” Two crew members died. According to the surgeon and writer Atul Gawande, a newspaper called the plane “too much airplane for one man to fly.”
After the crash, “Air Corps personnel developed checklists” for takeoff, flight and landing. The Model 299 became the B-17, and 12,730 B-17s followed. Gawande retold the story in The New Yorker and in his book The Checklist Manifesto (2009).