Use the emergency checklist

Memory gets you through the first ten seconds; the checklist gets you through the rest. Knowing which is which is the whole skill.

Memory items first, then read-and-do

The C172S emergency procedures (POH §3) come in two layers, and using them well means knowing the boundary:

• Memory (immediate-action) items — the steps that must happen now, before there's time to find a card: the opening moves of an engine failure (best glide, fuel/mixture/mags) and a fire (mixture cut-off, fuel off, master off). These you know cold and execute from recall.
• Read-and-do — once the airplane is safe and the immediate threat is handled, you pick up the checklist and read the remaining steps to confirm you missed nothing and to work the longer items.

Under time pressure, do-and-verify beats read-and-do: act on the memory items, then check the card — far safer than burying your head in a book while the airplane descends unattended (R1). The checklist confirms your memory; it doesn't replace flying.

A practical habit makes this real: hold the airplane in trim and look down only in glances. Read a step, look up and fly, read the next — the same chunking that keeps a lost-procedures fix from costing you altitude (VI.D). The checklist isn't a script you perform head-down; it's a reference you consult between the things you're really doing, which is flying and deciding.

Finish it even when it seems solved

The discipline pilots skip — and DPEs watch for — is completing the checklist after the problem appears fixed. When the engine smooths or the smoke clears, the temptation is to call it done and move on. But the checklist exists partly to catch the secondary cause: the item you'd never think to check because the primary symptom is gone. Running it to the end is the antidote to the misdiagnosis in R1 — it walks the known-good sequence regardless of what you assumed the problem was.

On the practical test, "use the checklist" doesn't mean recite it perfectly from memory — it means manage it appropriately: memory items first, fly the airplane throughout, then read-and-do to confirm, and finish what you started. An applicant who keeps the airplane under control and works the checklist deliberately is demonstrating exactly the judgment the element is testing.