Submitted by Eric Daniel
Two things turned me on to these indispensable binders; the 1991 Canadian Army Trophy competition (where I was a gunner) and the SGT Morales club (where I was caught moving in the open.) For the first, the checklist binder was indispensable for providing a easy access means of referencing our gunnery SOPs and procedures, as well as providing me with a means to record all of my boresight data, as well as store cut out maps detailing the location and lane responsibility for all the target pits out at range 301 in Graf (for you who have never been there, there are a LOT of target pits out at 301.) For the second, the check list binder was my concession to the Board's requirement that I carry a binder with all my soldiers CTT/ SQT/APFT/IWQ/Personal data and favorite color in an easy access format (most SGT Morales candidates I saw were carrying veritable file cabinets of information.)
The flight crew checklist binder, for me, became my battle book -- if it wasn't in my binder, I didn't need to know it. What it did contain were BOLF FACE pages for 9-line MEDIVAC requests, Close Air Support requests, INSUMs, aerial photographs, everything I needed to accomplish my mission (as soon as I got kicked off the Corps-level Morales board (my first line supervisor was in the wrong uniform apparently), all that silly CTT/APFT, etc... "stuff" went out the window.)
The neat thing about these checklist books is that you can mix and match pages, it truly is a living document. I can insert and remove pages as required or needed (now a days I carry a lot of stuff from the engineer's field data manual on demo, bridge classification and mines, as well as frequently used phrases in Arabic.)
