"....there aren't large, Nimrod-shaped smoking holes populating the Scottish countryside, so it cant be the huge danger that BEags et al suggest."
But is that by (non) accident or by design?
And an ex-Nimrod chum of mine, now with ba, told me of the time when, after they went around for the second time at 200 ft at Kinloss, the navigator 'Captain' suggested that they went a bit lower on the next approach. The 1st Pilot got out of his seat, went down into the back of the thing and said to the idiot "OK - all yours then!".... Needless to say, they diverted. The press-on-itis I witnessed an AEO 'Captain' trying to inflict on 'his' crew at ASI was also something which no sensible pilot captain would ever try. The sort of "We're hairy and operational and don't need your soft truckie fatigue rules" nonsense which does cause accidents!
I will agree with Roly on only one point - the 'non-Q'FI. Totally unnecessary.
The OTJT comments came up through the idiotic idea that by being allowed to sit in the LHS, Herc co-pilots would somehow magically 'learn' captaincy through osmosis in operational environments and thus need a shorter co-capt course.
One other point, yet to be discussed, is that if it was decided that all VC10 co-pilots, for example, should henceforth be trained to operate from either seats, then what about all the exisiting pilots? Should they also be re-trained? Just who would foot the bill for that? How would it be a cost saving measure?
When I did my co-capt course, I was told by the QFI at the time that under no circumstances should 'new' captains be allowed back into the RHS until they had at least 6 months under the belt getting used to the new environment. And that was for experienced pilots - not some barely trained current generation Teutor/King Air graduate.
Don't fix what isn't broken! It doesn't affect me directly now in any case as, like the wise Art Field, I'm no longer in the mob - except that I would hate to be the one to say "I told you so!" at some future date.
Last edited by BEagle; 22nd Feb 2005 at 11:47.