This poster does a better job of articulating my thoughts then I can, this is off a different forum.
I'll add this also...
Captains? BE CAPTAINS!
We started to hammer this last week and a couple of events since have highlighted this issue yet again.
We get paid to command and make command decisions. We are given all the tools we need in the FAR’s. Sometimes even the Ops Manual helps us out. We just had out NRT crew get paid and while management seems to think the Captain did not make the right decision, an arbitrator surely will.
The point is this: everything this airline does, from selling tickets, to cleaning the lavs, to catering the airplanes, to checking baggage in at curbside, is designed to do one thing: move people from A to B. And in the process of moving those people from A to B there is only one place on the airplane where every decision from outside the airplane can be accepted, modified, or overridden. It’s the ultimate place for stopping the buck: the left seat.
For far too long, we have allowed others to make our decisions for us. The Ops Manual has grown over the years from a couple of hundred or so pages to almost 1,000 pages today. Most of that growth was an attempt to diminish us as pilots and substitute canned words and responses for cockpit judgments and decisions.
We must decide: Do we want to be paid and treated as skilled and responsible professionals? Or are we content to be labor, operating our heavy equipment in the manner we are directed to by management and subject to their whims when we stray from the path they set for us—sometimes after the fact?
If you are faced with a decision, if you have to make a call, if you are treated with disrespect by your flight attendants, your ground crew, your caterers, your schedulers—or your supervisors—remember who and what you are: you are The Captain—and you are In Command of the aircraft. Command is sometimes an unpleasant task, and sometimes you must make decisions that will not be popular—but that is why you command instead of take a popular vote.
First Officers, you aren’t off the hook, either. Monitor and respectfully challenge your Captain if you see him shying from decisions or failing to stand up for his crew. We monitor and challenge when we manage threats and errors when we fly, why not do it outside the airplane, too? We can take control of our profession again—but every one of us has to make it happen; it will not be given back to us freely.