The Go-Around

The runway is visible. The gear is down. The flaps are set. You've briefed the approach, verified the weather, and confirmed the winds. Everything has been building toward this single event — the landing — for the last thirty minutes, the last hundred miles, maybe the last several hours. Passengers are expecting a smooth arrival. The schedule demands it. Your pride wants it.

And then something isn't right.

Maybe the airspeed is fifteen knots fast. Maybe a gust pushed you off the centerline and you're correcting back but not quite there. Maybe the descent rate crept up to a thousand feet per minute and the PAPI lights are all white — you're high, or all red — you're low. Maybe it's nothing dramatic. Maybe it just doesn't feel stabilized.

This is the moment that separates the disciplined pilot from the lucky one.

The Stabilized Approach

Every airline in the world publishes stabilized approach criteria. The specifics vary slightly, but the principle is universal: by a certain altitude — typically one thousand feet above the runway in instrument conditions, five hundred feet in visual conditions — the aircraft must meet a defined set of parameters. Correct speed, within a few knots. Correct configuration — gear down, flaps set. On the proper glidepath. On the centerline. Appropriate descent rate. Engines spooled to a power setting that allows immediate response.

If any of these criteria are not met at the gate, the procedure is unambiguous: go around. Add power. Pitch up. Clean up. Climb away. Try again.

There is nothing technically difficult about a go-around. Student pilots learn the maneuver within their first few hours of training. Power up, pitch up, positive rate, gear up, flaps up. A child could memorize the sequence. The aircraft is designed for it. The engines are built for it. The airspace system accommodates it without complaint — ATC simply vectors you back around for another approach, and nobody loses anything except a few minutes and a few hundred pounds of fuel.

And yet the data tells a remarkable story: somewhere between ninety-five and ninety-seven percent of pilots who find themselves flying unstabilized approaches continue to landing anyway. They press on. They convince themselves that the deviation is manageable, that they can salvage the approach, that the parameters will converge in the remaining seconds before touchdown. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes the evening news carries a different story.

The Flight Safety Foundation has found that more than half of all approach-and-landing accidents — the single largest category of fatal airline events — could have been prevented by a timely go-around. Not by better technology. Not by more training. Not by additional regulation. Simply by doing the thing every pilot knows how to do and has been trained to do since their first day of flight school.

So why don't they?

Get-There-Itis

The FAA has a clinical term for it: get-there-itis. It's the psychological pressure to complete a flight as planned, regardless of changing conditions. It's on the hazardous attitudes list right alongside anti-authority and invulnerability. But unlike those other attitudes, get-there-itis masquerades as professionalism. The pilot pressing a bad approach isn't thinking of himself as reckless. He's thinking of himself as determined. Capable. Someone who gets the job done.

I've felt it. Every honest pilot has. You're tired, it's the fourth leg of the day, the hotel is twenty minutes from the airport, and you just want to be done. The approach is almost stabilized. Close enough. You can see the runway. It'll work out. You tell yourself you'll salvage it in the last few hundred feet.

That's not determination. That's the sunk cost fallacy wrapped in a flight suit.

The sunk cost fallacy is the human tendency to continue investing in a course of action because of what we've already invested, rather than evaluating the course on its present merits. We've been flying this approach for ten minutes. We've briefed it, configured for it, slowed down, descended, communicated with approach control. All of that effort — all of those miles — feel wasted if we push the throttles forward and climb away. So we don't. We press on, adding the weight of prior investment to a decision that should be made only on current conditions.

This is not a failure of skill. It is a failure of character.

The Harder Right

The go-around is easy to execute and hard to decide. That inversion tells you something important about human nature — and about the broader challenges of responsible decision-making.

Consider how often we press bad approaches in life outside the cockpit. A business venture that isn't meeting its milestones, but we've invested so much already. A policy that isn't producing its intended results, but admitting that feels like conceding a political argument. A relationship where the criteria for a healthy outcome haven't been met for years, but the thought of starting over feels like failure. A career path that looked right at cruise altitude but is clearly unstabilized now, and the ground is getting close.

In each case, the responsible decision is the same one it is in the cockpit: recognize the situation honestly, accept the cost of what you've invested, and start over from a position of safety. Add power. Pitch up. Climb away.

The go-around is not defeat. It is the exercise of judgment — the decision that the runway you're lined up for is not worth the risk, and that a better approach is worth the time.

This is what mature leadership looks like in any domain. Not the dogged pursuit of a bad plan because changing course feels like admitting error. Not the pretense that the deviation is manageable when the instruments say otherwise. But the willingness to push the throttles forward, accept the cost of the wasted approach, and set up for one that can be flown with discipline and precision.

The Culture That Makes It Possible

There's a reason airlines drill stabilized approach criteria into their crews relentlessly and build it into every approach briefing. It's not because captains are incompetent or need to be managed. It's because the decision to go around requires overcoming powerful psychological forces — and the best way to overcome powerful psychological forces is to make the right decision automatic before the moment of pressure arrives.

When the approach brief includes an explicit commitment — "I will go around if not stabilized by a thousand feet" — the decision is already made. The only thing left is execution. The briefed commitment converts a hard judgment call into a procedure. It removes ego from the equation. It makes the right thing the default thing.

This is also what good institutions do. They establish criteria in advance, when the pressure is low, so that the people inside them don't have to make the hardest calls in the hardest moments with the least time to think. The checklist exists precisely because humans under pressure make worse decisions than humans preparing calmly. The stabilized approach criteria exist precisely because the pilot on final with his destination in sight is the worst possible person to decide whether to press on.

Personal minimums work the same way. The pilot who decides, in the comfort of his living room, that he won't fly in ceilings below fifteen hundred feet doesn't have to fight his get-there-itis in the weather briefing room with his bags already packed. The decision is made. The criteria are set. What remains is only the discipline to honor them.

That discipline is the hardest part.

The Pilot Who Goes Around

I have a great deal of admiration for pilots who go around.

Not because the maneuver is difficult. Not because it impresses passengers or earns applause from the gate agent. But because the pilot who goes around has done the hardest thing: admitted, in the moment of maximum commitment, that the current approach is not good enough — and acted on that admission before the pavement made the decision for him.

That pilot will try again. He will fly another approach, this one better set up, briefed more carefully, flown with the benefit of one more look at the airport. And when he lands, it will be because the approach was good enough — not because the fates were kind.

The pilot who presses the unstabilized approach is betting that his skill will compensate for conditions that don't meet the criteria. Sometimes that bet pays off. The wheels chirp, the passengers applaud, and the paperwork looks clean. But the criteria exist because the bet doesn't always pay. And the times it doesn't pay, the consequences are not recoverable.

The go-around costs a few minutes and a few hundred pounds of fuel.

The alternative sometimes costs everything.

Add power. Pitch up. Climb away.

Try again.