Originally Posted by MikeF16

Agree. What's more difficult is when you're (junior) in the right seat and have to be the captain. I believe I made a mistake accepting the extension on my most recent reroute and will likely act differently in the future.

At the risk of the usual flaming I seem to attract, I'll share my rr in more detail since I think my experience might help other inexperienced FOs in a similar situation. When we got the extra leg I was leaning towards not extending, the captain was very confident in his ability to accept the extension and I allowed him to sway my decision. It started small -- tracking gave us only 20 minutes to turn the plane and ferry it back to ATL to beat the extension clock. It was going to be our 6th leg of the day, we were leaving AVL after midnight, it is mountainous terrain, and we're operating off the taxiway which in DAL's opinion, raises the threat level of the airfield to where it is a captain-only takeoff and landing on a clear bright sunny day on your 1st leg. We had both made a few minor errors on the inbound leg -- nothing safety related, just a few little things that in retrospect I can attribute to being tired.

So then the snowball starts. No, we're not taking the jet we just brought in back to ATL, we're bringing a hangar queen that has been broke for 3 days and tech ops is still working on it. Then there's no plane in sight. Oh, it's at the GA ramp. And it's midnight, nobody to take us there, so time to walk out the airport and then walk to the GA ramp dragging our bags. We get to the plane and now we've got 2 guys from tech ops in our faces who are tired and angry they've been stuck in AVL for the last 3 days and want nothing more than to go home. We handle a few minor MX issues and crank engines, and the air stairs become a distant memory. But wait, where's the FSR? Can't raise anybody on the radio to bring them back. After phone calls back to dispatch and load control, 20 minutes later we get an FSR and depart around 0100 -- well into our extension. We finally blast and as we climb through 10k the captain can't get the AP to engage so it will be hand flown the rest of the way. But wait, what's he doing? He's mashing the approach/land button instead of the autopilot and can't figure out why the AP won't engage. I didn't notice he was hitting the wrong button but out of habit gave it a try myself and of course it worked just fine. Fit for duty?

In retrospect it was probably a poor idea to extend. There was never one smoking gun on the ground that told us that we need to go to the hotel now, just a bunch of little things that kept adding up and we didn't even realize we shouldn't be going. The next day on the van back to the airport, I thought this was something we should debrief with clear minds and expressed my opinion that while we thought it was correct at the time, in retrospect it was a mistake. I brought up all the issues I mentioned here and still the captain was adamant that he was just fine and at the time, there was no reason to not sign the extension. We safely executed the flight, never came close to breaking an FAR or bending metal so maybe he was right and I'm wrong. That said, it's easy to forget that the captain's 51% voting rights go out the window when it's time to decide if you're going to extend. If given a similar scenario in the future, if I'm going to err one way or the other I'd rather be explaining myself to the CP why I didn't go instead of writing a story here why I think I shouldn't have.