How about blaming the Chief Pilots, HR, and management in general for hiring, keeping and promoting/upgrading these idiots who have no business being in a rhs and much less a lhs.
Bigmouth - agree totally!
These things don't just happen - it isn't rocket science to get to know who is becoming a "prima donna" - any management worth it's salt would have spotted this a mile off and taken action. I feel that by sacking both pilots this takes the spotlight off the management. It would seem this was a badly crewed flight from the start for all sorts of reasons.
However notwithstanding CRM, "stroppy" FOs are around and need to be handled accordingly - if necessary this means offloading said FO. The Captain has overall authority for the flight (even if he is b*****d to work with!) and there are some FOs around who also seem to think they are "God" and have no idea of what it is like to have overall responsibility for the operation, although they
think they do.
Am all for good CRM but some of this "touchy feely" stuff has now gone too far. That said, good Captains have to have "style adaptability". A year or so I flew with a (very competent and nice) FO who had recently been released on line. He said to me in conversation "They dont teach you during line training that it's different flying with different Captains" My reply was "and when you get into this seat you'll find that different FOs are different to fly with". There followed a big "thinks" bubble - I don't think he had looked at it from that point of view before (understandably).
When I started as a young Second Officer in 1971 there were many more "character" Captains to fly with. I made it a personal rule that I would always fly with whoever I was rostered to fly with and, notwithstanding flight safety, do everything I could to work with them and operate as a team. I often found that much could be learned from some of the old b*****s who in fact were quite amenable if you came along with the right attitude.
This whole incident is symptomatic of what is wrong with our industry these days (and indeed one could say our society). The flight deck of an aircraft is
not the place to have an argument, by all means sort it out on the ground, of course.
In my opinion, for this event to have occurred is a failure of the "system" (or in this case the obvious lack of one) rather than the individuals.