Cosmo
 

Whilst I agree with all that Cosmo says and the plaudits that the post has garnered I think we have to come back to the original post.

This is after all a command 'course'. It's like any other course, be it a saling course, a driving course, a language course and you can do better than the average if you prepare well for that course. Now it might be that you should have been preparing for that course for years but we're not all as conscientous as we should be/the next bloke. That's why not everyone makes the upgrade and that's as it should be.

But as a trainer you should be helping/massaging your candidate to ensure that he does well on his 'course'. If you merely sit there expecting him to be an instant commander that's checking/trapping and not training. I know at least one airline that still has this approach. In my company this mindset stayed where it belonged-in the '70s'.

We're all pilots, but we'd need a course to become a glider pilot. Not all powered flight pilots make the transition. Doesn't neccessarily mean that you should be stripped of your powered stripes.

If the guy has the nouse to ask for some bullet points why should we snipe at him from the (lofty) LHS.

Any SLF that reads this thread has more intellligence than some give him credit for....he found this read after all and he's presumably interested in the nuances of aviation, not just what he reads in the Daily Fail.

Of course I agree it's a good idea to put in some extra effort if you are about to begin on an upgrade course (or any course). But as opposed to beginning something completely new (like beginning sailing if you never done that before, or taking a glider course, which I would contend is an equally new experience for an airline pilot), this should not come as something new and surprising.

Hence, the individual should have no problem identifying which areas to brush up on. Did I forget which systems operate on which Hydraulic systems? Or what was the rules for use of vacant crew seats? Flipping through indexes of the manuals should give a pretty good idea of what the candidate may have forgotten, that a checker would expect him to know.

When doing as suggested and if he find that he needs to re-read "EVERYTHING" (as suggested in a previous post), he is screwed. And I particularly hope it was not weather minima, fuel policy or the "memory items" that came as a complete surprise!! (Although all of it was also suggested as re-read items in some of the above posts. It's simply not good enough if these things are not known by heart by everyone in the cockpit!).

Actually it was these misguided suggestions that got me up my chair rather than the original poster.

But if the original poster is really quite serious about the broad question, I guess this link will cover the basics:
Task sharing in the modern 2 crew cockpit
I hope thought that it was more specific reading material that was sought after. :ouch:

Man up and get on with it.

As an F/O you get to watch...even though you're fully trained on type...right?

Now it's your time.

Do the work.

We all been there before you..........

Man up and do the job. If you were ****, they wouldn't let you!:ok:;)

Reuben...I clearly remember my first flight as "Capt"...Istanbul to Munich on a B-727...As we pulled onto the rwy, "Cleared for T/O", I remember thinking, "what the heck, it's only a 3' move"...my common sense said "don't do this" but my ego said "Let's Do It" and off we went...

Of course at that time I had 720 hrs as F/E in type, and over 1,500 as F/O in type...After the "rush" of being in "Command" of a jet with 180 PAX plus crew wore off, I realized the enormity of the situation...I didn't prang it in MUC and the F/O flew the return leg...

After that, all was well...my cherry had been busted and there were parties afterward...

Of course I had Instructed, flown C-402's, BE-99's and BE-1900's for about 10 yrs prior to my 1st "big airline" job as an F/E...

The avg seniority in my now defunct company for upgrade to Capt was 21 yrs, and that was for reserve on the "villemobile" i.e. DC-9..."Jacksonville, Chartloseville, Gainsville, etc...

You learned a lot in 20 + yrs...get my point"???

Whatever it takes to be a good commander, YOU can't learn it in a school...

I'm from the "old school" and wouldn't want to ride on an A/C with a 20+ or low 30+ yr old PIC...regardless of experience...

Could you fly a raw data NDB approach to an airport if things came down to that??? Or better yet, do know what "push the nose, pull the tail" means?... If not, rely on your "computers" but it's gonna "bite" you one day...Sure as the day is long your 200 F/O PFT wonder is not going to...

Sorry, that's just my opinion...Sorry for the rant...

There is a lot of good advise here-especially Cosmo's post, but I will bring up something nobody else has. Captain and FO are two different jobs. The best way I have heard it put is that the FO is the detail guy and the Captain is the big picture guy. The FO runs the checklist while the captain makes sure you don't run into anything while taxiing. Let the FO do his job. You need to know what he is doing, but let him do it. Otherwise you are likely to run into something. I went though a FO transition course after many years in the left seat, and I had an initial upgrade captain. He was a very experienced FO and FE, but he had no clue how to be a captain and barely made it through. His biggest problem was trying to do my job and the engineer's job instead of concentrating on his own.