The Go-Around: Why Good Pilots Quit Bad Approaches

Here is a statistic to sit with: in real-world airline operations, a meaningful share of approach-and-landing accidents begin as approaches the crew knew were unstable - and continued anyway. The stabilized approach rule exists because of that pattern, and the rule has a second half that gets far less attention than the gates and the criteria: the go-around. The escape hatch. The manoeuvre that makes every other rule in the series enforceable - and the one manoeuvre that virtually no sim pilot ever deliberately practises.

This article is about fixing that: what a proper go-around looks like, why the decision is harder than the flying, and how to train both until "we're not landing off this one" becomes a comfortable sentence.

Reframing the manoeuvre

Start with the psychology, because it is the actual problem. A go-around feels like failure - an admission that you couldn't land. Professional aviation spent decades deliberately dismantling that framing, because it kills people: crews who saw going around as embarrassment continued approaches they should have abandoned. The modern airline framing is the opposite: a go-around is the system working. No one is debriefed for going around; crews are debriefed for not going around when the criteria said to. The landing you can always have is the one six minutes later.

Sim pilots inherit the bad framing with none of the corrective culture - there is no training captain in your spare room. Worse, the sim adds a unique corruption: nothing is at stake, so every approach can be saved, so every approach is. Salvage a terrible final often enough and you train, rep by rep, the exact instinct that FOQA programmes exist to hunt down: continuation bias, the quiet conviction that this will probably work out. It is the most expensive free habit in simulation.

The decision: gates, not vibes

The point of a go-around policy is that the decision is made before the approach, not during it. During, you are the worst-placed person to judge - busy, invested, and descending. So borrow the professional structure:

• The stability gate. 500 feet (visual) or 1,000 feet (instrument): configured, on speed, on path, normal descent rate - or go around. Not "nearly": the gate is binary, that is the entire point.
• Below the gate. Stable at 500 doesn't guarantee stable at 100. A gust that balloons you, a float that will not end, a bounce, drift you cannot kill before touchdown - all are go-around triggers, all the way to the runway.
• After touchdown, even. The balked landing is real: a bad bounce or a touchdown long enough to threaten the far end is still flyable, in most aircraft, into a go-around - power up, fly, sort it out upstairs. (Know your aircraft's limits here; a fully spoiled-and-reversed airliner is committed.)

One more real-world gate worth copying: if you find yourself arguing with yourself about whether it is salvageable, it isn't. The debate is the data.

The sequence

The flying itself is simple, but it is simple in order, and order is what collapses under surprise. The universal skeleton:

Power - pitch - configure - climb - then talk.

1. Power: all of it, promptly. Full throttle (or TOGA). Smooth but decisive - and in a piston single, expect the yaw and be ready with rudder.
2. Pitch to climb. Set the go-around attitude and kill the descent. Expect a strong nose-up tendency in trimmed, flapped GA aircraft - a C172 at full flap and full power wants to point at the sky, and you must hold it down while you sort the trim.
3. Flaps in stages. Retract to the go-around setting (typically one notch immediately, the rest with positive climb and speed). Dumping full flap at once near the ground is how go-arounds turn into sink.
4. Positive rate - gear up (if applicable).
5. Climb away, then navigate and communicate. Runway heading to a safe altitude, then the circuit rejoin or the published missed approach. The radio call - real or to yourself - comes last. Fly first.

In airliners the skeleton is the same with the automation layered on: TOGA commands go-around thrust and flight-director guidance in one action, the pitch target comes up on the flight director, flaps retract one stage on the call, gear up at positive climb - and then the step pilots bust in the sim exactly as in real recurrent checks: the missed approach altitude. Go-arounds in jets are startlingly quick - a light A320 at TOGA climbs like it is trying to leave the scene - and levelling off at a 3,000-foot missed altitude arrives in well under a minute. Preselect it before the approach, always, and know your go-around's second act (acceleration altitude, flap retraction schedule) as well as its first.

Two classic traps: the half-hearted go-around (partial power, shallow pitch, drifting along the runway in ground effect deciding whether you mean it - mean it, immediately, or land), and in instrument flying the missed approach fumble, where the go-around is fine but the procedure that follows was never briefed. If an approach has a published missed, brief it before you need it, every time.

Training it: three drills

1. The commanded go-around. Fly circuits and go around on a schedule - every third approach, decided before engine start. This divorces the manoeuvre from failure entirely: you go around because it is rep day, and the sequence gets its repetitions without ego involved.

2. The late surprise. Harder: fly a normal approach and go around from ever-lower heights - 200 feet, 100, the flare, then after a deliberate bounce. This trains the transition your hands find hardest: from landing configuration and landing mindset to full power and climb, instantly. (It is also the best bounce-recovery training there is - the answer to most bad bounces is the go-around.)

3. The honest gate. For a full session, enforce the 500-foot gate with zero tolerance - one knot fast counts, half a dot high counts. You will go around more than you expected; that is the finding. The drill teaches both halves: flying the manoeuvre, and discovering how often your "stable" wasn't.

The logbook that shows go-arounds

Recording your flights changes this manoeuvre's status the way it changes everything else. My FS Flights detects a missed approach as its own flight stage - a go-around is not a mangled landing in your logbook, it is a correctly identified, correctly flown manoeuvre in the record, with the approach that triggered it scored honestly beside it.

And that record makes the cultural point better than any article: a month of flying with a scattering of go-arounds in it is not the logbook of a pilot who cannot land. It is the logbook of a pilot with standards - the same signature that marks out disciplined crews in airline data. The pilots who never go around are not better. They are just not looking.

Fly the drills this week. Six circuits, two commanded go-arounds, one honest gate. The landing will still be there when you come back for it.