Up, up and away! (Perhaps...)

"Going around" is taught as a normal flight manoeuvre from the beginning of a pilot's training. Why is it so rarely executed?

The go-around is one of the important safety-related procedures to which a learner pilot is first exposed during initial training. The student is taught that a decision to discontinue her approach to landing, to climb back up into the sky, can be prompted for any of a variety of causes. A vehicle or other aircraft suddenly encroaches on the runway; an abrupt ATC instruction is given, for reasons momentarily unknown to the pilot; gusting winds or strong crosswinds might cause the pilot to become uncertain of placing her aircraft safely on the ground; recovery from bouncing or “ballooning” is required, and the only way is up; or she may have landed long, is still moving at speed on the ground, and is about to run out of runway. Wind-shear or poor piloting technique may cause a loss of airspeed; visual contact with the runway may be lost.....the reasons for conducting a go-around are multiple - and these examples are by no means exhaustive. Numerous go-arounds are therefore practiced both in real and simulated flight, and well-instructed students are (or should be) taught to be never afraid of going around, if in the slightest doubt about the safety of the imminent landing.

It will noted that some of the above examples of causes relate to occurrences on the ground, while others are events which take place while still airborne on final approach. These latter causes we describe as affecting the stability of the approach, and the concept of “stabilised approach” has become a fixed principle in safe flying practice. It is now enshrined in recommended practices and regulations: under ICAO rules, such as “PANS OPS” (Doc 8168), as interpreted by regulating agencies, commercial operators must conduct all approaches with reference to the "stabilsed" concept.

With some variations between operators and agencies, an approach is typically considered to be stable if various criteria have been met, during the approach, before reaching 1000 feet above the landing airport level: the aircraft must be on the correct gradient as published or required by the operator; must be at or close to the correct speed and power settings for this phase of flight as per manufacturer specifications; must be in the landing configuration (landing gear down and landing flap set). The idea is that by setting up the aircraft, its configuration and its energy dynamics in good time, as close as possible to the desired profile for landing, the pilot has fewer distracting things to do during this critical phase of flight. She can thus focus on maintaining the exact flightpath and speeds required to alight the aircraft safely on the ground.

This is crucial because approach and landing accidents (ALAs) account annually for approximately 65 percent of all accidents. In other words, the ALA phase of flight is the most likely occasion for an accident. A Flight Safety Foundation (FSF) study, analysing 16 years of runway excursions, determined that 83 percent could have been avoided with a decision to go around. By this analysis, 54 percent of all accidents could potentially be avoided by going around.

So far so good: the business of abandoning your unstable approach and initiating a go-around would seem to be an open-and-shut question. If you are not on a stabilised approach by the target height, then you have to go around. This is clearly stated in most operators' Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). And we know that SOPs must be obeyed in all but the most extreme and unusual circumstances, correct?

In fact, it turns out that the requirement to go-around in these circumstances is an SOP more often ignored than executed. By the above criteria, a considerable proportion of approaches to landing are unstable. But according to FSF studies, in only 3% of those unstable cases does the crew actually execute a missed approach / go around. In other words, 97% of unstable approaches are flown to a landing, notwithstanding all the dire warnings (not to mention the SOPs) urging crews to go-around in such circumstances.

This finding adds a layer of complexity to the unstable approach/go-around scenario: Why is the rate of non-compliance so high? To study this intriguing question, Flight Safety Foundation recently initiated the Go-Around Decision-Making and Execution Project. As part of that project FSF engaged The Presage Group, of Ontario, Canada, to study which psycho-social aspects of pilots' behaviour and attitudes might affect their compliance (or non-compliance) with stabilised approach criteria. Presage Group is a consultancy devoted to improving the safety cultures of corporate clients in a wide variety of industries. Flight Training News caught up with Dr Martin Smith and Captain William Curtis of Presage at the recent Flight Safety Foundation International Air Safety Summit in Dublin, Ireland, and they outlined some of the results of their study.

Some key findings they described were:

• The industry as a whole (both management and pilots) largely accepts the non-compliance with go-around polices, despite empirical evidence indicating this is the most common contributor to approach and landing accidents.
• Reducing unstable approaches is seen as the sole means to reduce ALAs, even though empirical data show that unstable approaches affect less than half of runway excursions.
• Pilots’ overall awareness of ALA risks — and of the impact those risks have on approach and landing safety — is low.
• Management is generally disengaged from go-around non-compliance and has low awareness of the impact it has on ALAs. Management’s perception of risk is low.
• Pilots do not see current go-around policy criteria as realistic for the operational environment.
• Effective go-around decision making in flight deck communication is low.
• Procedures and training do not adequately address many of these challenges.

Further emerging from the Presage study are some fascinating insights into the readiness of different pilots to comply with go-around policies, depending on their overall level of situational awareness (SA). Presage's Dr Martin Smith characterises SA as a complex interaction of nine basic psychological constructs, or “aspects of awareness”, such as Affective Awareness (A “gut feeling” for threats), Functional Awareness (knowing the instruments and equipment), Hierarchical Awareness (expert knowledge of operational procedures, their order and correct sequencing) and other interconnected measures of overall awareness. Their research shows that the higher the pilots' SA by these measures, the more likely they are to comply with go-around procedures, and to have a deeper understanding of the risks attached with unstabilised approaches.

In this short article it is not possible to cover the full extent of the report, which examines not only pilots' attitudes and practices regarding unstabilised approaches, but also those of airline management. However another interesting finding, germane to the daily practice of pilots, is that when the study's pilots were segmented into groups depending on their recent experience of executing go-arounds, versus making unstabilised approaches which were continued to a landing, those with more experience of having gone around were more likely to assess the risk attached to unstabilised approaches as higher. Their practical experience would seem to prime them to more readily abandon such landings, as a safer option to continuing to the ground.

The report also examines the validity of existing unstable-approach criteria, and presents a renewed set of more flexible definitions for industry consideration, which more realistically reflect the day-to- day experience of pilots and their perceptions of associated risk levels. It explicitly states "current guidelines on when a go-around must be executed are not realistic for most real-world operational environments and approaches" and is recommending, for validation by the industry, go-around criteria based on three procedural gates:

? a 1,000-ft AGL configuration gate (variable from 800 ft to 1,500 ft, depending on aircraft type);

? a 500-ft AGL stable gate;

? a 300-ft AGL go-around gate.

and also invoking psychological primers such as redefining unstable flight below 300ft as a "go-around condition" rather than simply an unstable condition, to increase the likelihood of the pilot making the correct decision. Research has shown that flight crews who continue an unstable descent below 300 ft do not recognise the need for increased concern — or the need for a go-around. Comparison is made with a similar recent change in terminology - the re-description of "Pilot Not Flying" as "Pilot Monitoring" - another industry initiative which aims to improve safety outcomes through verbal cues as to what behaviour will best achieve them.

Where do these findings leave the beginner pilot, and her instructors, back at the commencement of flight training? Are they just “high level” analyses, fit only for consideration by airline professionals? The answer to that must surely be in the negative. Serious consideration of such studies as these, by student pilots and by ab-initio instructors, can offer stimulating insights into the subtleties behind the seemingly straightforward techniques, such as the go-around, that we learn, teach and practice in early flight lessons. And on this particular topic Captain Curtis, himself a former director of flight safety in a major airline, has a simple message for those at the beginning of their flying journey: “Never be afraid to go around. Regard it as a badge of honour!”

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The final report of Flight Safety Foundation's Go-Around Decision-Making and Execution Project can be found on their website at flightsafety.org.

Learn more about The Presage Group at presagegroup.com.

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A version of this article first appeared in Flight Training News, November 2017.

(c) 2017 Darragh Owens