The checkpointing scheme is a well-known technique to cope with transient faults in digital systems. This paper proposes an adaptive checkpointing scheme for the reliability improvement of real-time control systems. The proposed adaptive checkpointing scheme is based on the previous work about the reliability problem of an equidistant checkpointing scheme. For the derivation of the adaptive scheme, some conditions are introduced which are to be satisfied for the reliability improvement by exploiting an equidistant checkpointing scheme. Numerical data show the proposed adaptive scheme outperforms the equidistant scheme from a reliability point of view.