Not when I'm on the road.

I flew with that captain on many occasions when I was an FO. He was most definitely NOT one who slipped through the cracks. Yes, he (and many others hired around the time he was hired at Legacy AA) was forced to spend nearly twenty years in the right seat before finally upgrading, but that right seat time had no effect on his flying ability and command ability. He was excellent in both arenas. He was a good stick, and an excellent captain. I never saw anything from him that made me question his abilities in some way or another.

Why he grabbed so much left rudder as he was about to rotate is a mystery, though. Absolutely a screw up, and he had no idea he'd done it to himself.

I ran into him during a layover one evening maybe five to six months after it had happened and had a discussion with him about this, and asked him if he knew he'd hit the sign and the ground. He said neither of them knew they'd hit anything and the airplane absolutely flew normally during climbout. It wasn't until the FA showed him the picture that the passenger had taken that they had any inkling they'd hit anything at all. He remarked to me how the fbw system completely masked the damage.

So is he losing it, or did he just make some really bad mistake in the moment? Who knows?

There ya have it folks… an opinion form a 20,000 hour pilot with 200 hours, if that much, in their logbook.

Interesting details.

58 is pretty young to be losing it. In a previous life I flew with a number of 65-70yo retirees in an expat gig. Some were razor sharp. The guys that were losing it were tough to watch because they'd be rock solid in all areas then just do something sort of bizarrely erratic. Worse they would sometimes catch themselves doing it, and you'd see some pretty depressing realizations cross their minds.

I think the information we have about this event isn’t sufficient to say whether age, fatigue or whatever played a role or not. Moreover most of our speculation around age is probably centered on news events today than the details of this event. So perhaps we're viewing this thing, as lay observers, through colored glass?

I must be dense, because I do not see any rudder trim indication on the FDR excerpts they published. Where are you getting that from?

And yes, per the Vol2 the rudder trim is monitored by the takeoff config system, and it would have triggered on both the Config Test and thrust lever application.

Here is an interesting commentary about the incident -

AA300 A321 JFK