Good point Rat 5
I am one of those relatively new captains that you speak of. I've got over 3000 hours in the left seat of the 320/321.
Davies was spot on, by talking of enthusiasm being one of the best resources for the job and thankfully, I still carry this in spades.
Let me make this clear: Failure is a much better teacher than success.
From my perspective the problem will always be, you don't know what you don't know and having a few hours 'without incident' can very much lead you down the path of complacency.
The first thing that woke me up was failing a sim session for the first time ever, I was absolutely mortified. I had studied, I knew what to expect and then, on the day, the major failure occurred and although I got the thing on the ground safely, there had been a couple of altitude busts during initial descent (around 300 feet each time) and I had interrupted the FO at critical times during his ECAM actions without really giving my timing much thought.
What was clear to me was not that I couldn't hand fly the aircraft but rather I didn't have the various stress tested blocks of flight management process in place for example, what to do before even starting the ECAM, when to interject or review and how to observe my offsider sanctions effectively.
As a result of course, I spent most of the exercise second guessing each decision that I had already made, which then led to tunnel vision, etc, etc.
The company was a lot easier on me than I was on myself and and after picking myself up off the floor I then started speaking to other skippers about their various management models, I took a little from here and there and came up with some very specific and clear processes that could be transposed on to any situation with regard to aviation, navigating and communicating in that order.
The second thing was AF447: Holy s#!t, three 'qualified' guys couldn't figure it out and I was flying with guys almost every day with less experience than the least experienced guy on that flight deck.
I had always had a great deal of interest in reading the crash comics as I understood that I didn't have time to make all the mistakes myself and rather, had to learn from others including the crew of AF447. Since then I have spent plenty of time reading up and transposing my own blocks on to various other situations to stress test them and all I can say for sure is that I am much more experienced than I was before.
Failure in the sim sucks but if it happens to you, lap it, take notes, learn well and move on with greater confidence and be thankful for the chance to fail in a safe place.
Great discussion.