Originally Posted by
FACoff
Rex - tragically I can relate to nearly all of those. Perhaps my CRM is lacking but I also find people take the open question concept way too far. A recent favourite, "what do you think about use of the APU today?". Umm, let's use it...?
What can I say, we're either flying for different airlines or you've been very lucky indeed. The other day, my skipper successfully briefed for the entirety of a 50 minute cruise. I was ready to hang myself by the end of it. When, over a beer later that evening, I tentatively brought up the more 'abbreviated' briefing style at my previous airline, he was incredulous. As I recall his words were - "that's appalling, there's always something to brief. If not, pick the QRH up and go through some memory actions together". And guess what, that's exactly what we did going into Heathrow. After he'd briefed me about Heathrow of course.
I’ve been through this painful experience many a time mate, I feel your pain. The lack of awareness in these people is unbelievable. They think they’re being safer by comprehensively briefing every detail when in actual fact they’re having the opposite effect. If you’re familiar with a destination then less is definitely more. I had one guy start to brief the destination approach whilst on stand at T5 (and it wasn’t MAN) and another brief every possible taxi routing from 27L back to stand. I had to remove my own shoelaces at that point.