Decade plus here & I’ve never flown a sports charter (fortunately, perhaps I'm realizing) so I can’t sound off on “cultural” claims but I really feel for the FO in this situation. There are days when the right seat feels like the easy job but this is definitely not one of them. As a CA I make my share of unintentional errors but anyone asks me to intentionally violate the FOM/FARs, it’s an easy conversation- “Sorry, I don’t feel comfortable with that.”

We can judge his decision in a vacuum, but most will probably agree that having your concerns explained away by multiple tenured employees as a probationary pilot is a crappy position to be in. Yeah the guy would have been better off to have called the FODM himself, but there are a lot of other pressures that go along with being new & I think it’s probably an overreach to assume he’s necessarily someone who wouldn’t ever assert himself in the future. In fact, had this been used as a teaching moment he’d probably be far more likely to do just that than the fresh new guy you hire off the street to replace him.