What really amazed me was at the start of the leg, he did the takeoff briefing for the leg I was to fly. In all my years in aviation, I've never seen that done. It's basic that the pilot doing takeoff briefs the takeoff. To have the non-flying pilot make the briefing is unheard of.

The next thing was that he insisted on taxiing before the flight engineer had had time to complete the items required by the taxi checklist. I pointed that out and he snapped that the engineer could do those things later. That's how things get accidentally left undone. I've seen that kind of thing done before, I've done it myself in unusual situations, but to do it when there were no unusual situations and for a standards captain to do it—wow.

I made what I considered two errors during the leg, one having to do with my lack of familiarity with the aircraft (an ex-Peoples Express airplane set up differently than any other 747 I've flown) and the other being a little behind the airplane on the Canarsie approach to runway 13L at JFK in the heavy crosswind we had when we arrived. The 13L and 13R approaches (along with the IGS approach at Hong Kong) are not liked by pilots since they involve low level turns just before touchdown. He, of course, really chewed on me for these items as well as others that were, in my opinion, of his own creation by his micromanagement. In the end, I wrote him off as a hypocrite because, when were finally finished, he said “not bad considering you haven't been flying for a couple years.” The important thing is that he signed me off with no negative remarks on the paperwork—hard to figure after the ragging I took during the flight.