Agree with 411A on all points.Call-outs should be kept to a minimum and speak up only when things are ABNORMAL.Confirming a normal or expected FMA might be a good idea on the Airbus as there are more of them and each annunciation has a more complex implication to the pilot.On the Boeing it's completely unnecessary except perhaps during initial training.
Crossunder's point that excess verbosity automatically equates to good CRM(thirty years on,we still dont have a definitive answer to what is good CRM)is absolute b.s.
The best flight-decks are pretty quiet ones.
Have watched guys in the sim make a dozen call-outs during start-up and still miss an exceedance.Point is that stating the obvious doesnt make it a safer operation.
The flap-speed call is not a bad thing at all,but "speed checked,flaps ..." is all you're ever going to need.
There's a low-cost Irish airline that requires pilots to do a x-check of nav aids and instruments during the most critical phase of flight,namely approach and landing.This represents up to 2 minutes of heads down verbosity when all they should be doing is monitoring the flightpath and ATC.PFD and ND annunciations will alert the crew to any discrepancy in the pilots altitude,speed and heading.And the nav aids?Well,that should have been taken good care of in the briefing prior to descent.
The Cali crash is totally unrelated to this topic and whoever said it was(probably crossunder again) has totally missed the plot.The pilots accepted a runway change at the last minute and workload resulted in loss of situational awareness.They could have cross-checked with each other till they were blue in the face and it wouldnt have mattered.The error was not procedural...they didnt fly the plane...and why?Because they were about five minutes behind it due to a poor judgement call.Next time your colleague types the wrong waypoint in the scratch pad,let him and see what happens.The world wont stop turning,I can assure you.Reach over and select HEADING.Just fly the plane.