Mutt -
Let's imagine for three minutes that you fly airliners and that you are going to do the longest over water trip on Earth...
Now imagine that your airline has chosen the very best pilots to do this seemingly demanding trip, because you just don't have many options for a number of problems that can happen enroute....you either go back, you go forward, you put it in the water.
Translated for those that don't fly over mountains, in the ice, over hostile terrain at night, that means you deal with the problem up in the air, better yet, get ahead of the problem so that it can be prevented and mitigated.
Ergo, the sharp pilot will want to know if the $10/ hour dispatcher got his weights right, if the BEW or BOW is correct, if the dispatcher calculated 150 midgets to get past fuel limitations or if they calculated correctly for the charter flight of football players at an average weight of 225 lbs a piece.
For an airline pilot to not need to know the weight of his aircraft, the passenger weights, not know his fuel burns at altitude and just get a little 8x11 page of information from some girl in dispatch saying...'your good to go' and blindly head off out of over the Pacific is beyond stupid...it's so stupid that I can't believe even the airlines are that dumb...it's so stupid that I can't believe even the most sell out unprofessional, chief pilot butt kissing FO wouldn't sit there half way to HNL and not want to pull out the book and a little calculator and try to see, just for grins, if the numbers are correct.
There are only two answers for this...either you guys are complete idiots in every sense of the aviation term or you have been culled by the very best chief pilots to not ask questions, not wonder whether the numbers are correct, not ponder looking out over the water if your going to make it, because the culling process is so extensive that they have found the guys that will follow the captain into the side of a mountain and not ask questions.
My guess is the latter, as we have a library full of crashes where the FO went right to the scene of the accident by saying little more then 'well um, I think we are a little low'.
So why would I expect that FO, now a captain, flying to Hawaii to actually question the numbers, to actually want to know why 150 football players loading up only equates to 10000 pounds of passenger weight that mysteriously doesn't make it on your computerized dispatch form.
You don't want to know..out of sight, out of mind.
Mutt, any pretext that your some sort of aviation expert on this forum is a long dead conclusion on my part.
You don't give me the numbers I ask because your either to dumb to give them to me, or you don't want to give them to me. If you can't do a simple fuel burn calc, if you can't pull the numbers out of some abreviated company dispatch for all of us to see clearly, you hiding, your stalling, your do everything you can to muddy this up, hence in the end, your not for real.
Have a nice day.