I rode the jump seat in a British Airways 747-400 a number of years ago from about Greenland to San Francisco including the landing and taxi in. It was the scheduled LHR-SFO daily flight and I was invited up partway through it.
While it was hard to believe, neither the captain or first officer had ever been to SFO before or if they had it had been a long time since. It was a nice day and the approach and landing were uneventful but once on the ground and clear of the runway the flight crew had no idea where their gate was. While the first officer started pawing through his airport diagrams the captain sort of "drove us around."
At one point Ground told him to take such and such a taxiway and the captain started a turn onto the wrong one. Realizing his error, he slammed on the brakes and then turned us sharply toward the correct taxiway. When he hit the brakes there was muffled yelling and a few quick screams to be heard from the passenger cabins behind us.
The first officer asked if he should call the tower for directions and the captain said, no way, we're going to find this bloody thing on our own.
Eventually they did and all ended well. But it was an interesting example of how as a pilot you tend to just fly the "room" you're in and give no thought to the fact there is a whole plane of people behind you. I even found myself doing this in the 206 I flew in Hawaii and in the Beaver I fly here. It's almost a surprise to turn around and see a bunch of people sitting "back there."
On an Air Mike flight in the 1980s returning from Guam to Hawaii the captain, who was a seasoned scuba diver, had been describing all the stuff to dive on in Truk Lagoon to the first officer who had just gotten into scuba diving. The crew lived in Seattle and the first officer was not familiar with the lagoon and all the WWII wrecks in it.
So the captain proceded to give him a guided tour of the lagoon and the better wrecks to dive on. This in a 727 Combi with a full load of passengers and cargo. I was riding in the jump seat and at about 1,000' the captain would bank the plane over 30 degrees this way or that to show the first officer, me, the flight engineer, and the mechanic, such and such a wreck. This went on for some 30 minutes with the captain flying the 727 like it was a Cessna out for a weekend jaunt.
Finally he allowed that he'd probably better go in and land or the cabin crew would get pissed.
