If I see something, I will act appropriately... but what is appropriate?

Banging on the cockpit door during an approach is probably more trouble
than it's worth in this post 9/11 world. And being long on a approach
in VMC is far from an emergency.

On a 3 person flight from Newark to Albany one night, the flight crew
decided to do a max performance takeoff on one of Newark's 10,000'+
parallels. Full power with brakes, release, aggressive rotation, stall
horn, the whole bit. I didn't appreciate it but by the time I realized
what was going on, we were climbing into a crystal sky and all is well.

On a flight out of Houston one night, they couldn't get a cargo door
closed. They kept sending more bigger guys out to try to get the door
slammed shut. I guess I've been reading too many NTSB reports but after
too many tries at closing the door, I took a low profile walk up to the
cockpit and asked the crew if they were going to take a look at that
door if the ground crew was ever successful in getting it shut. They
told me no, and that someone on the ground was responsible for doing
that and it would be fine. I'm sure that was the right answer but I
elected to get off the plane, stay overnight at my expense and fly home
the next day. No one except the crew knew what happened but I swear
they looked a little spooked when I saw them lounging at the gate
awaiting further ministrations by the maintenance crew. Yes, they did
depart later and all was well.

I figure that once I've agreed to fly with someone, I'm going to play
cargo while they do the captain part unless I see something wrong and
can take appropriate action. OTOH, if I'm PIC and someone decides to
wrest control away from me or otherwise interfere with my
responsibilities, I'll nuke 'em. I'd expect the same.

Everett M. Greene wrote:
The ongoing "discussion" of the LEX accident reminds me
of an incident I experienced many years ago of potential
pilot error. I was a passenger on commercial flight on
a smaller airplane (make and model not recalled but it
was twin-engine turboprop). As we were making the
approach to land, I could see out the windshield and
noticed that we were overshooting the field on final.
Other observations indicated that whoever was doing the
piloting wasn't very good at it in the sense of at least
being lightly experienced. A question I pondered at
the time and since is whether I should have hollered
at the flight crew to correct the descent path or go
around. One doesn't want to panic the other passengers
needlessly but one also doesn't want to quietly be one
the first to arrive at the crash scene either.