CORRECT!

You open the hangar doors, attach the tow-bar to the fittings on the nosewheel strut and pull the aircraft out of the hangar. You walk over to your truck and remove the items you will need for today's flight: your headset, GPS, water bottle, charts, approach plates, passenger. You glance at your watch and realize that if you are going to beat the t-storms to the beach, you gotta go now. You remember that you topped off both tanks after your last flight, but you decide to hop up on the strut to take a quick look into the tanks, just to be safe. Both full: so far, so good. You plug in your headset and GPS, strap your passenger and yourself in, place the key in the ignition: mixture rich, no prime [it's summer!], pump the throttle twice, master switch on, turn the key and...WHAM!! Something up front just went very, very wrong.

You turn the master off and remove the key with extreme trepidation. You hop out to see what the heck that was up front. What you find is a prop with about 3 inches of one of the tips missing and a jagged 6-inch crack propogating along the prop blade. You also see the cause: the tow-bar is still attached to the nosewheel fittings, leaving it directly in the prop arc.

This could have been prevented if the pilot had performed a systematic and thorough pre-flight inspection using a checklist based on the manufacturer's recommendations. We can minimize potential inflight problems also by checking critical systems during the pre-flight and run-up. Safe flying demands a disciplined approach to everything the pilot does. On the day of the flight, the process starts with a thorough pre-flight.