Oval....please tell me your post is a wind up....you can't be serious? If you really do feel this way, then you are diminishing the very profession you belong to. I should expect this kind of reasoning from someone like Primed, but not from you!
For goodness sake, one gets a P1 rating when you upgrade from S/O to F/O....that doesn't make him a Captain....it makes him a co-pilot. Do I really need to explain the difference between a brand new F/O and a Command Course grad? Between someone with 500 hours and someone with 10000 hours; between someone who has not qualified by virtue of inadequate hours and someone with the hours; between someone who has completed a command course and someone who has not. Do I really need to do that? Would you want to be, would you want your family to be, anywhere near an airplane landing in a typhoon, or in an airplane experiencing any number of technical failures, with a brand new F/O at the controls?
Does someone with a shinny new P1 rating really make the same decisions? Really? When a Captain asks what everyone in the cockpit thinks, do you think he's taking a vote? Are you perhaps confusing good CRM with command? Just who is licensed, by virtue of their experience and qualifications, and held responsible, by the CAD to make the final call?
We pilots are our own worst enemies in how we diminish our profession. And by doing so we play right into the bean counters impression of us.....we help them achieve their goal of diminishing what we do.
In the old days (pre-911) when we used to allow passengers into the cockpit, and when the wide eyed pax would inevitably look around the cockpit with awe, they would always ask with incredulity: how do you guys remember all these switches/dials?
Do you know what we all said? We said: "Ahh...Schucks Mam, it's nothing....nothing at all....a monkey could do it." Well guess what guys? After 50 years of telling people this self deprecating crap....they took our word for it...they believed us!
Do you ever, or have you ever, heard a Doctor, Lawyer, or ANY other profession, diminish what they do like we do? No other profession does this.....just us.
If you still haven't read Ernest Gann's book Fate is the Hunter, or The High and the Mighty, you need to that. What he wrote about flying, all those years ago, remains pertinent today. If not more so.
Last edited by raven11; 22nd Apr 2012 at 06:26.