This captain is kind of interesting. A nice guy, but he is clearly the weakest captain I have flown with so far. He's a big, fat guy, an Air Force Academy graduate and military retiree (30 years). He really doesn't know how to fly a 747, doesn't realize the importance of large aircraft energy management and flying smoothly for the passenger's sake. That's not surprising; he's an ex-fighter pilot. My first leg with him was when I was sitting in the back. Coming into Delhi, I noticed the speed brakes kept being deployed, stowed, deployed, etc.—really uncomfortable for nervous passengers. They make noise and shake the airplane. Later the operating f.o. came to me to make it clear that the captain, not he, had been flying. What had happened was that he had allowed himself to get high on the approach profile. He made the same mistake on the approach into Paris last night. The steepness of your approach is dependent on how much power you're carrying, how much drag you're incurring, and how much potential energy (altitude & weight) you have to dissipate. We had a heavy airplane so had a lot of energy to dissipate. When he should have had the power all the way off and the speed high (thus incurring a lot of drag), he was carrying a little power and had the speed down around 280 knots. Normal descent is accomplished at 320 knots, and you can use 350 knots or more if you need to dissipate a lot of energy, assuming of course that the air is smooth enough to permit that (it was totally smooth last night).

I didn't say anything to him to that point as I didn't know what he really had in mind, and it wasn't a safety issue. But there was an airplane behind us, and ATC asked us to pick up our speed to 320 knots. I couldn't believe it when he did it by adding power, so I finally said, “Just for information, you're inside three to one,” referring to the fact that our distance in nautical miles to the airport was less than three times our altitude in thousands of feet. That's the standard descent profile for a 747. He acknowledged but didn't immediately do anything, but after about 10 seconds he brought the power all the way back and stuck the nose down to get the speed. Jet pilots in general (and fighter pilots in particular) tend to think of speed as power related and altitude as attitude related. Light aircraft pilots think of it the other way around. Of course, the two are related and you need to adjust your thinking to the situation. Anyway, ATC gave us a vector to get us down and it all worked out.

Nice guy, but he's really nervous, and he has a hard time taking advice from his crew (another fighter pilot problem, they want to do everything themselves). As we cleared the runway at Charles de Gaulle (Paris's international airport), I picked up our taxi instructions from ground control and started guiding him per those instructions. He had the taxiway diagram in front of him and disagreed—it's hard to taxi the airplane and also interpret a taxi diagram. I said I'd ask for progressive instructions from ground control, that way they'll tell you which way to turn at each intersection. He ordered me not to do that. At that point I gave up, after all, all we were talking about was a few more minutes and some minor embarrassment. That came about 30 seconds after we had passed the intersection where I had advised turning. Ground control came on, said we had missed our turn, and gave us another set of instructions, adding about a mile to our taxi route. To his credit, he acknowledged his error and apologized for not listening to me. I tried to soften this by pointing out that the taxi diagram is not really clear—which it isn't. You just have to know from having done it before—which I had on two previous trips. But the way to taxi an airliner at an unfamiliar airport is for the taxiing pilot to pay attention to the taxiing and the non-taxiing pilot to communicate and look at the taxi diagram—basic cockpit resource management. He'll learn.

All in all, though, it was nice to be needed, to be truly useful. Most of the time the f.o. is not really necessary in a three man crew. The captain and the flight engineer operate the airplane. The f.o. is there mainly just in case.

I cringe now at having written that last sentence, but I've left it in because that's the way I wrote it, and my attitude at the time. Looking back I think I was still hurting ego-wise from having had to step down from being a Captain to being a First Officer when I changed employers. In reality, in a well-functioning three-man crew, the f.o. is an integral part of a team, and this is especially true when you have a weak captain.