In a typical commercial airplane cockpit there is a captain, a first officer and
sometimes a flight engineer. In this chapter we will limit ourselves to considering the
relationship between the captain and the first officer. We begin by describing the many
sources of the captain's authority. They include rules, different levels of flight
experience, aviation tradition, military, corporate, and societal norms and values.
The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) states that a captain, nobody else, is the
final authority on the airplane.
The CFR sets differential requirements for captains and first officers. For a
captain it requires about 1500 hours of flight time and for a first officer the requirement
is only 200 hours of flight time. Once a first officer fulfills the CFR requirement to
become a captain, he or she must also fulfill the captain requirements of the particular
airline. Personnel policies provide additional thresholds for both overall flight hours and
flight hours in the particular aircraft and the pilot also needs to have seniority on the
airline's union list. It typically takes a decade or two to become a captain on a large
airplane. In the NTSB’s accident sample (see below), captains had 3-4 times more
experience than their first officers whether measured by the historical total flying time
(median times of 14,000 vs. 5,100 hours) or the experience in the accident aircraft type
(median times of 3300 vs. 880 hours).
Aviation organizational norms include the individualistic thinking from the
historical period of the single-pilot planes. This tradition devalues the first officer. Thus,
the institution of the first officer is "not fully developed," and the latter plays a "distinctly
secondary role". Indeed, "in 1952 the guidelines for proficiency checks at one major