And what if the 250 hour cadet second in command pipes up and replies he is not ready because you haven't briefed him on your step by step sequence of actions to conduct a go-around and exactly why you have decided to go-around in the first place.
Tongue-in-cheek of course. But seriously, where does this warm and fuzzy pat the doggy attitude, stop?
Well, in your situation, firstly you would know that a pre-brief would be a very good idea to prepare the F/O and to review all the important actions. A 250hr F/O will not necessarily be able to perform perfectly in the real airplane when something unusual is thrown at them even though they will have passed all the tests in the SIM. You need to nurture your inexperienced crew. They are the equivalent of learner drivers.
I never said you needed to explain your reasons for going around, nor did I say that a pre-brief needed to be a long drawn out process
A go-around is an unusual procedure which we rarely do. In theory, we should all be expecting it on every approach, and would all perform it faultlessly it was required. But we also know this doesn't always happen. A very senior training Captain and his F/O at a previous airline both forgot the gear and left it down during a go-around in a 757. Had he taken 5 seconds to run through the important actions before actually calling the go-around, it might have made it run more smoothly.
.....in any large passenger jet, the power levers are manually advanced to full power - i.e. firewalled, you will get full power regardless of auto-throttle or autopilot settings, right?
In other words, manual advance of the power levers will over-ride all automatics?
172_driver explains this: in some types having pushed the levers forward you will get maximum thrust, but if you then let go, (to put both hands on the yoke for example), the levers will be motored back towards idle unless you also press a separate TOGA button.
The point I was making earlier is that Airbus have designed-out this conundrum by engineering the manual TOGA switches so they do not need to be separately found and pressed and can ONLY be selected by pushing the thrust levers fully forward - which is obviously where the levers need to be !
Airbus FBW thrust levers fully forward = TOGA, no ifs or buts 