PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Your landing or mine - the captain's ultimate responsibility
Old 30th Mar 2007, 01:04
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DutchRoll
 
Join Date: Apr 2000
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It's called faith. As a member of a crew, each of us has to have faith that the other member or members will carry out the required functions as per training. This applies whether the other crew-member is known personally or a complete stranger.
Relying on faith, ScottyDoo, is playing a potentially dangerous game. While "meeting the minimum company standard", FOs, like Captains, have varying abilities to handle demanding conditions. This is not a sledge on either - just stating a fact.

Noone should have "faith" that everything will be just sweet when yours and a couple of hundred other lives depend on split second decisions, especially under conditions like those. Otherwise I may as well catch up on a few winks of sleep and tell the guy to wake me after the landing. This of course doesn't mean you have to swing the pendulum fully the other way and be completely paranoid. A nice, calm balance somewhere in the middle would be good.

On go-arounds, from the QF perspective the company has done a lot of work trying to encourage that practice if there are any doubts about the safety of the approach. Several people I know recently (myself included, as the non-flying pilot ) have done them for various reasons, made the required phone call to Ops (just to fill them in and pre-empt any "I thought we were all going to die!" reports from pax), and not another word has been said.
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