Tony, that's allways the goal as I see it. My situational awareness should be that of the captains and the captains situational awareness should coincide with mine. This is however never the case. We will allways have a different take on things. It can range from small insigninficant things to things that can bring the flight down.
The most dangerous being things that are often very obvious and standard. Items where I'm taking for granted that the commander has not overlooked anything.
I remember one time, we were flying a normal departure, no SID or anything, just direct to the first point. I notice all of a sudden that the captain isn't flying the flight director. I see that the autopilot isn't engaged and I haven't heard a call to engage it either so I'm taking for granted that he's flying manually and just doing a very poor job of it.
All of a sudden, he notices the discrepancy and makes a comment of that the autopilot is doing a very poor job of flying the flight director. I comment that it is not engaged.
Apparantly, he'd tried to engage it, but he made no callout so I missed it. It never engaged properly and he didn't check it a second time. If he'd never made the comment of that the autopilot was doing a poor job I would never have been let in on his little secret. In this case it was also poor SOP as we actually don't have a call for this. But it shows the significance of talking to each other of what we are doing or planning to do. Forgetting this and taking things for granted keeps the two SA loops far apart and the goal is to have 2 coinciding loops or at least a communication between so as to find diffrences.
LnS