After reading this thread with some interest and still being amazed at the ability of some contributors not to read posts addressed to them properly, I felt I had to add my tuppence worth.
My love of aviation stems from 2 incidents when I was a child, one when I was 8 being alllowed into the cockpit of a Tri-star en-route to Malta from EGKK and being in their for about half an hour being shown all the 'screens', buttons & controls by the FO whilst my mum was being chatted up by the Captain (Handy to have an attractive & single mum then lol). The second was when I was 12, again en-route from EGKK to Malaga where shortly after take off I requested to visit the FD and was allowed and proceeded to be invited to stay there in the jump seat for the entire duration of the flight including landing and taxiing... I was allowed into the LHS, allowed to take the yoke, follow through the autopilot and then for about 60 secs the AP was disengaged and I was able to hold the aircraft steady (with the FO having his hands on the RHS controls also), I was even supervised changing the co-ordinates on the AP.... It was, as you can imagine, truly amazing (the flare freaked me out a bit at the time lol).
Now, sadly the most we can hope for is a brief visit to the FD before take off, as I was able to do for my son 6 weeks ago from Orlando..
However, it intrigues me how
Mercury Dancer can make comments like
"As a passenger I would have objected to a child being on the flight deck" as surely at 47 years old he would have been flying pre 9/11, even when I was 12 in 1989 he would have been 28 and just how many times did he
object to a child being on the FD? I would bet that it was a big fat none. But surely, if his argument was vaild, that he would object to a child on the FD as they are an
unsafe person (from a control perspective), rather than the fact that it breaks mosts companies SOP's, then he would have been objecting on most flights he's ever taken between 1961 and now - Infact I hazard a guess that he felt himself unsafe to visit the FD when he was a child and therefore doesn't see why anyone else should have had the chance to do it.
Lastly, as much as I may not like the closed FD door policy, the likelihood remains that if a policy such as 'allow little Johnny's & Janet's access during flight, what harm can it do?', would undoubtedly be exploited by those with harmful intentions at some point using an impressionable child as a tool
