Narrative:

A checklist design issue arose on a ferry flight I flew tonight. When looking at the A320 ferry checklist on the ipad the first officer initially thought no doors were supposed to be armed. The first bullet on that page is 'all cabin...doors...arm.' he thought that this was bullet #6 under the header: 'if cabin will be occupied' which is on the previous page. Since our cabin was not occupied he thought this bullet did not apply. When you look at this on the ipad; it's not hard to see how this can be misinterpreted. I pulled out the QRH and on that it was readily apparent that the 'all cabin...doors...arm' bullet had a different indentation than the proceeding five bullets under the 'if cabin will be occupied' header. This indentation is not readily apparent on the ipad though. I'm not trying to open a can of worms here; but just point out this issue. If the combination of only viewing one page at a time on the ipad; along with the indentation formatting issue lead to confusion with one person tonight (with a mundane checklist being read with brakes set); I'm sure it could happen again with other checklists.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: The formatting of a ferry flight preflight checklist on their iPad EFB led to confusion regarding the arming of cabin doors.

Narrative: A checklist design issue arose on a ferry flight I flew tonight. When looking at the A320 Ferry Checklist on the iPad the First Officer initially thought no doors were supposed to be armed. The first bullet on that page is 'All cabin...doors...Arm.' He thought that this was bullet #6 under the header: 'If cabin will be occupied' which is on the previous page. Since our cabin was not occupied he thought this bullet did not apply. When you look at this on the iPad; it's not hard to see how this can be misinterpreted. I pulled out the QRH and on that it was readily apparent that the 'All cabin...doors...Arm' bullet had a different indentation than the proceeding five bullets under the 'If cabin will be occupied' header. This indentation is not readily apparent on the iPad though. I'm not trying to open a can of worms here; but just point out this issue. If the combination of only viewing one page at a time on the iPad; along with the indentation formatting issue lead to confusion with one person tonight (with a mundane checklist being read with brakes set); I'm sure it could happen again with other checklists.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of July 2013 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.