Originally Posted by INTERNET PILOT

I feel your pain. My last company had 4 captains who were totally cool, and one captain who was a total douche bag. This guy had the attitude that "I'm the captain therefore I know everything, you're the FO therefore you know nothing", when in reality it was kind of the other way around. He would go out of his way to make my life miserable. He always acted like he was the only person on board that could do anything right. For instance he'd tell me to do the landing weight/distance calculations. After I do the calculations and tell him my results, he'd almost always quip back, without even thinking "THATS WRONG, do them again". He's not doing this because he thinks it'll be better for the safety of the flight. He's doing it to drawl attention to the fact that he has power and I don't. This kind of crap gets old after a while. Eventually I figured him out though. He himself was very unknowledgable when it came to many things. He was very unconfortable with icing, flying in IMC, heck even talking with ATC. His "tough guy" attitude was to cover up his vulnerabilities. He was afraid that if he admitted to not knowing something, I'l lose all respect for him. So he made damn well sure that I had the impression of him as being a real tough decissive guy who doesn't let anything pass. But it didn't work because I could see right through it.

I have a feeling that in my long career in aviation that lies ahead of me, I'm going to run into a large percentage of captains who have this "I need to beat these four bars over my FO's head or else they won't respect me because I suck at flying" attitudes. It sucks but what are you going to do?