411A - I have often been a fan of your postings, but your contribution to this debate is positively embarrassing. I am an Airbus Training Captain and in my foolishness believed that the attitudes displayed in your posts towards your fellow professionals were long-since gone. This is nothing to do with changing society for the sake of it and losing respect for elders - it is all to do with safety, safety and safety. When I train a new 200 hour pilot, the last thing I tell him is that regardless of our relative experience levels, I am totally capable of making a major error and if he sees something that alarms him he should shout out. The reason the attitude you display is so unacceptable is that it is dangerous and makes you a crash waiting to happen. It completely leaves the other pilot out the loop and removes one of the key components of a safe flight deck - a First Officer who will question what he does not feel comfortable with. It is the very reason that aviation outside the western world has such safety issues - a paternalistic approach to the guy next to the captain which guarantees he does not speak up when he needs to. You are breeding into your First Officers from Day One an unwise respect for authority that assumes the Captain is always right.
Back here in the western world where ever-increasing safety is a goal of all credible airlines, no stone has been left unturned in investigating why crashes occur and what can be done to avoid them. Much is wrong with the western world, and no one laments it more than me. Nonetheless, when it comes to aviation we have a lot right. One of those things that is right is making First Officers feel they have a voice in the process of flying. Sure, there are risks in that strategy and occasionally some guys misunderstand their place in the system. Overall, however, I am delighted to encourage First Officers to shout out when something wierd or uncomfortable is happening.
I note you quoting the wonders of SQ (Singapore Airlines). Perhaps you have forgotten the case of SQ006 which was a scheduled flight from Singapore Changi Airport to Los Angeles International Airport via Chiang Kai-Shek Airport (now Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport) in Taiwan. On 31 October 2000, at 15:17 UTC, 23:17 Taipei local time, a Boeing 747-400 on the route attempted to take off from the wrong runway in Taipei during a typhoon, destroying the aircraft and killing 83 of the 179 occupants. There were 2 First Officers on board who neither questioned the decision to take-off in a typhoon or to use the wrong runway. No doubt these redoubtable individuals were a product of the faultless SQ training system you espouse. The simple fact is that these FOs were unquestioning, overly-loyal individuals brought up on a diet of 'the Captain is always right' and a sense of their own low place in the hierarchy or eastern society. The result was catastrophe.
You will rightly point to a number of accidents in the western world over the years in similar circumstances. The one that comes to mind is that of Captain Stanley Key - an aggressive and much-disliked British European Airways (now British Airways) Trident Captain who was the commander of BE548 on 18th June 1972 out of Heathrow. The aircraft stalled on take-off and there is significant evidence to suggest that the very inexperienced co-pilot failed to act due to fear of being shouted down. That accident is well-known and within the UK was the beginning of a long and painful journey into what is now called CRM (Crew Resource Management). The airline industry in the west was forced to recognise, through this, and other terrible accidents, that overly-dominant Captains with young, inexperienced First Officers is a recipe for disaster. Since then enormous effort has been made to change the cockpit culture so that the FO can, and indeed should, shout out when something is going wrong. The world you still cling to 411A is yesterday's world that that is rightly being attacked in the interests of flight safety. The change in western flight deck practices has brought enormous safety benefits, but those benefits have yet to work their way to all airlines in the Far East and beyond. There is none so blind as those that will not see, and I do not expect you to embrace my view - such is the nature of denial. Nonetheless, I hope that many reading this will recognise the enormous benefits of encouraging all First Officers from day one to question the Captain if they do not like what they see. That is not an invitation to insubordination - it is an invitation to follow the best practices we know save lives.