I am just as happy with the CA knowledge and attitude as they should be with mine; trust is earned whichever side of the flight deck door you are on. It is everyone’s personal responsibility to be qualified to undertake the duties entrusted to them in all of the circumstances envisaged by the regulators.
I am more concerned that the regulators have not thought through or appropriately judged the likely scenarios against the industry’s threats; e.g. what is more likely, a hijack attempt or an in-flight cabin fire?
Captain Stable, your personal view implies a somewhat narrow view of CRM.
I follow the Helmreich definition, - “CRM is the application of Human Factors”, and thence there are two major skill areas, cognitive and interpersonal.
Interpersonal CRM training involving both the flight deck crew and CA is important, but in balancing the necessary CRM skills, I choose to concentrate on cognitive CRM (thinking and judgement), which appear to be at the root of more accidents than other CRM aspects. Thus first of all, if the industry gets individuals to behave appropriately, then there is ground on which to build interpersonal skills.
Furthermore, in an industry with only limited training time (4 hrs / year classroom CRM ?), the focus of attention has to be on embedding CRM / HF into the daily operations; thus ‘training’ should be undertaken with the CA on every flight. The Captain (or First Officer) must demonstrate exemplary interpersonal skills in his leadership of the crew ‘team’, but just as important, the flight deck can learn from the CA; they are the people who exercise interpersonal skills with every passenger on every flight. Generally, the skills used by the CA in an emergency are automatic reactions; thus provided they follow good cognitive controls – awareness, discipline, judgement, they will achieve as much if not more than the flight deck crew will in an emergency.