"Gord Beaman" ) wrote:

Ed Rasimus wrote:

Cut me a bit of slack please.


Of course...and I fully realize that your post was meant to show
up the humour in the situation (and was quite well done too).

Ahh, then my work here is nearly done.

Also I can readily understand how a pilot and a WSO who fly
together constantly on an a/c designed to be quite intuitively
flown could develop a working scenario where minimum chatter is
involved. But when a PIC and a Co-pilot are picked at random to
fly a large passenger airliner then procedures need to be
standardized so that everyone is using the same songbook. Toss in
a third crewman as used to be the case and you have a lot of
chances for disaster if they're not all on the same page. It may
sound silly but there's a really good reason for standardization.

I don't think standardization is in the slightest degree silly. Just
as you assemble random crews from the pool in the airline business, so
also is there random assemblages of fighter crews into flights of
four, elements of two and in multi-place tac aircraft in the same
airplane. It's an absolute that all the players do things the same
way.

Anyway, perhaps I shouldn't be trying to teach you anything but
you must admit that with all the possibilities that exist in a
large modern airliner's cockpit for misunderstanding that
anything that will lessen the possibilities is a good thing. You
must also admit that I have much more experience with this aspect
of flying than you do.

And, except for the big paycheck, I don't envy you in the slightest. I
never had the desire to go into that business, although I know lots of
my peers that had or have a second career in the airlines.


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (ret)
***"When Thunder Rolled:
*** An F-105 Pilot Over N. Vietnam"
*** from Smithsonian Books
ISBN: 1588341038