I hope that the rotation of an uneven number of captains and first officers on a first-in, first-out basis will keep me from having to fly with this captain again, though the worst is over, primarily because he embarrassed himself so badly on the first leg. He's probably just hoping that the first officer and engineer don't blab to others about how badly he fouled up...and I won't. I still believe the best policy is that “what goes on in the cockpit stays in the cockpit, what goes on on the trips stays on the trip.”

I do fault myself for not noticing the extent of his screw ups sooner than I did. I've done a lot of thinking about what happened, trying to analyze what threw me off. The sequence of events and how I reacted to them follows.

First, his little “if I have to ask you more than once, I'll kick your ass” speech when we first met at the hotel really put me off. He repeated the same speech to the flight engineer when we got to the airplane. He also made it very clear at the hotel and at the airplane that he liked to do a lot of hand flying and that he would run the P10 panel while he was flying. The P10 panel has the autopilot, heading, altitude, flight director and other controls. Company policy is that the non-flying pilot runs the P10 panel.

I, also, like to hand fly, and I'm not adverse to reaching up and operating the P10 panel while I'm flying if the non-flying pilot is busy on the radio, but it was obvious this guy wanted to be a one-man show. My reaction was to let him, really that's my only choice as first officer. However, my reaction should have been to let him but to watch him very closely, but you normally don't have to watch captains closely.

After takeoff he hand flew the airplane all the way to our initial cruise altitude. I noticed that he tended to wander on heading, pitch, and airspeed, occasionally even descending slightly when he should have been climbing. It would have been a far more efficient climb had he used the autopilot from, say, 20,000 feet on up. However, he, like I, hadn't been flying much, and it is hard to hand fly the airplane when you get into thin air, and what was going on wasn't unsafe, it was just sloppy flying.

He finally engaged the autopilot for cruise, and that part of the flight was relatively uneventful. However, as we neared Batam, our destination, I noticed that he spent a lot of time figuring out at what point he wanted to start his descent. Batam held us high beyond the point where he wanted to start down. That upset him, setting up a constant stream of verbal complaints from him. At that point he was hand flying the airplane, running the P10 panel, talking a lot unnecessarily—obviously uptight—and contending with an approach to an airport he had never been into before. That should have have been more than a clue to me than it was. I remember thinking that he shouldn't be hand flying in this situation—it takes too much of your attention—and he had obviously overloaded himself.

I didn't understand why he was devoting so much attention to where he wanted to start down. The distance to the airport in nautical miles was showing on one of the INS displays, and the calculation is very simple: for an empty airplane, which we were, multiply your altitude in thousands by three, and that's how far out in nautical miles you should start your descent.

He remained concerned about getting lower. It didn't seem to me that that was a problem, so I switched to the ILS on my navigation radio. The glideslope showed us to be slightly below the glidepath, which meant that our getting down was no problem. I asked him if he would like the ILS system on his side, but he said “no” emphatically. He doesn't take well to suggestions from a first officer.

It made no sense at all for him not to use his nav radio to bring up the ILS. It wasn't being used for anything at the moment—we were being radar vectored—and we knew we would be cleared for the ILS shortly, at which time he would have to put it on the ILS. What I was doing was to politely enable him to realize that he was not at all high but instead a little low insofar as intercepting a normal glidepath. When we were given clearance for further descent, he astonished me by idling the engines and putting out the spoilers.

Then, with the spoilers out, he asked for “gear down”. This loaded us up with drag and gave us quite a descent rate. At this point we got instructions from the approach controller to descend to and maintain 2000 feet and establish outselves on the localizer (the final horizontal approach facility). Just as we approached 2,000 feet, the approach controller called with clearance for the approach and instructions to switch to tower. There was the usual amount of language confusion involved, but that was really no excuse for my not monitoring the airspeed more closely. Not doing so was where I screwed up in the procedure.

What happened was that in reaching 2000 feet, he hauled back on the stick to level off but forgot to retract the spoilers (they're over on his side, not readily visible to me), and, inexplicably, he didn't call for any flaps. The first two notches of flaps also extend the leading edge devices, which convert the wing from a high speed configuration to a low speed configuration. In other words, with them out, you have a much lower stalling speed than with them retracted.

While I was still on the radio, I noticed that we had sunk below 2000, but that really wasn't a problem. The weather was good, it was daylight, and the terrain flat. I could see the runway clearly, and it was now basically a visual approach. He finally arrested the descent at 1500 feet, but speed bleed off was rapid, and just as I finished talking on the radio, the stick shaker went off. The stick shaker is the stall warning device on a 747. It's very loud—unmistakable—and it actually shakes the stick. In all my hours in large jet aircraft, I have never heard one go off, never even came close to seeing one go off. You hear it only in the simulator when you're practicing stall recovery or when you're testing the device on the ground before each flight.

I looked down at the airspeed and saw it at what the minimum safe speed would be if we had 10° of flaps (the third notch), but we still had a clean wing (no flaps). For his part, he relaxed back pressure and the stick shaker stopped, but of course we started to sink. I said, “Do you want flaps?” He said, “No,” and started adding power, and then apparently put in some back pressure, which set off the stick shaker again. He then yelled, “Gimme flaps, gimme flaps!” What he didn't know was that when I heard the stick shaker go off the second time, I had already started the flap handle (on my side and not readily seen from his side) toward the second notch, which would put out all leading edge devices, effectively resolving the problem.

The proper call at that point should have been “Flaps 10” or at the least “Flaps 5” to get all the leading edge devices out (Krueger flaps).

The stick shaker stopped, but the airplane still wasn't responding to the power input as it should have. He then realized that he still had the spoilers out, retracted them, and from that point on things returned to normal, and he made a very nice landing insofar as touchdown was concerned.

The sobering thing was that, at an altitude of 1000 to 1500 feet above ground, we had the stick shaker twice. Not Good. Had it been a check ride, he would have probably been busted back to first officer for such a lousy job