Thank Your Pilot on the Next Go-Around

Working in your bizjet’s cabin, you notice subtle changes that indicate the airplane is in descent. Sure enough, the seatbelt sign illuminates and you fasten your seat belt for landing. As the landing gear extends, you know you’ll be on the ground in just a few minutes. But then you hear the engines spool up again and there’s the unmistakable feeling of acceleration. You realize the aircraft is climbing and you may think, “What’s going on?”

If you’ve never experienced a go-around before, it can be a bit startling to rapidly transition from the descent to level off or climbing. Sometimes the startle factor develops into irritation or anger at the delay. But a go-around is a normal maneuver that pilots practice often, and if your pilots perform one, it’s a good bet that something wasn’t right, and the safest choice was to climb to a safe maneuvering altitude and fly another approach.

“Pilots know they are flying some very high-net-worth individuals that often expect perfection,” said Richard Meikle, executive vice president of operations and safety for FlightSafety International. “A go-around may be perceived by some as less than perfection, when in reality it might be exactly what is needed. It should be a moment for praise: thanks for doing what you needed to do to keep us safe.”

Anatomy of a Go-around

Transitioning an aircraft from landing configuration to climb configuration involves several steps, and a go-around is one of the busiest “normal” procedures that pilots practice. It involves making the decision to go-around, applying power to arrest the descent, pitching up to begin climbing, retracting flaps and landing gear at appropriate times, communicating with air traffic control, and possibly reprogramming the navigation system. Most business aircraft today have features to assist the pilots; depending on the aircraft, pressing the Go Around button may automatically increase the throttle, disengage the autopilot, or command it to fly a missed-approach pattern, and/or set pitch attitude and altitude guidance indicators on the flight deck.   

“Although it’s an uncommon procedure, there is nothing unsafe about a go-around,” said Meikle. “It’s essentially a modification of the same procedures used during takeoff.”

Go-arounds are uncommon because once the aircraft is configured to land in a stabilized approach, the reasons for not landing don’t occur often. One of the most obvious reasons for going around is another aircraft or vehicle unexpectedly appearing on the runway. Air traffic control may also request a go-around for spacing between aircraft or other reasons; they may leave the aircraft high, resulting in the crew not being able to continue to a touchdown in a stable condition.

Weather can throw more curve balls on final approach. A thunderstorm even 20 miles away can generate strong downdrafts, hail, and gusty winds that can destabilize an approach. Fog or mist can hamper visibility; depending on the airport approach minimums and the equipment on board, if the pilots cannot physically see the runway by a certain minimum altitude, they must perform a “missed approach” and either try again or divert to another airport.

Pressured to Land

The hardest go-around decision for a pilot to make, however, is when the approach is just subtly destabilized: a little too fast or too slow, a little too high or too low. Perhaps ATC requests required maneuvering that resulted in a destabilized approach; a switch to a different runway, vectors to avoid traffic, requests to maintain a slower or faster speed than normal, or direct the crew to maintain a higher altitude than normal can all result in the aircraft not being in exactly the right configuration when it passes through the decision “gates” established for safety.

Feeling the pressure of wanting to get the airplane on the ground—whether because of pride, perceived peer or professional pressure, or continuation bias—pilots sometimes try to salvage unstable approaches rather than go around to set up again, especially at high-traffic airports. Usually there’s sufficient runway length to absorb a slightly unstable approach, and the pilots get the aircraft stopped in time. But for as many as two aircraft per week worldwide, the runway length or width is not enough for the resultant landing and the airplane rolls off the runway in what’s known as a runway excursion.

“The vast majority of runway excursions are the result of a landing continued from an unstable approach that should not have been allowed to continue,” said Meikle. “Despite the publication of stabilized approach criteria, the go-around from an unstable approach rate has not shown any material difference for quite a few years.”

According to Meikle, less than 2 percent of unstable approaches result in a go-around. And while only a fraction of the other 98 percent of unstable approaches result in runway excursions, Meikle and his team at FlightSafety want to understand the psychology preventing pilots from making go-around decisions that could prevent more runway excursions.

“With runway excursion events continuing in the business aircraft sector, we have to do more to address the root cause,” Meikle said. “By focusing on the decision-making leading up to touchdown in training, we can directly attack the threat in flight operations.”

Studying Pilot Psychology

To understand the pilot psychology regarding go-arounds, FlightSafety has partnered with Presage Group, a world leader in predictive human behavior in the workplace, to study aviation go-around decision-making by two-pilot Gulfstream G550, G600, and G650 business jet crews. The study, which began during summer 2022, builds on a previous Citation Jet Pilots Association / Presage /FlightSafety endeavor that studied single-pilot go-around decision-making in 2020-21 and led to CJP’s Safe to Land Initiative in 2022.

“The focus of the [Gulfstream] study is the management of environmental instability,” Meikle said. “Some of the approaches will be completely normal with no reason to go around, and others will have just a minor variation to cause the instability. After each one, the pilots will be debriefed on their decision-making process and the factors that led them to go around or not…Once a pilot gets past expectation bias from being in the study, it really becomes an interesting scientific experiment. When I went through it [for the CJP study], it was some of the most powerful time I’ve spent in a simulator in my career.”

Presage’s Gulfstream pilot study will take place through early 2023 at FlightSafety’s Savannah, Georgia Learning Center where half of the 20 participating crews will receive new procedures and guidelines developed and updated from the earlier CJP study. The other half will serve as a control group, using their own experience to determine which situations require go-arounds. Each crew will perform about 10 approaches with a mix of varying environmental difficulty. At the end of the study, Presage will use its proprietary methods and intellectual property to make key recommendations to be rolled out in future FlightSafety curricula.

“Using our psychological tool to understand human behavior in the moment adds an important capstone to conventional procedural development, which goes beyond what normal operators do. It’s a switch in thinking,” said Piyush Gandhi, vice president of operations and business development at Presage in a press release about the Gulfstream study. “When this methodology was deployed with the Citation Jet Pilots Association, also in partnership with FlightSafety, the results were revolutionary. We intend to do the same for Gulfstream operators.”

The various Gulfstream models chosen for the study will help gauge whether a difference in control methodology affects pilots’ decisions to go around; in most two-pilot crews, either pilot can initiate the go-around. The G500 contains control columns where the pilot and copilot each have their own control yoke on top of a column directly in front of each pilot. The columns move together and can be seen out of each other’s peripheral vision. The G600 and G650 contain side sticks that are essentially out of the normal field of view.

“If I’m the non-flying pilot, and I can see the control column moving relatively quickly in my peripheral vision while monitoring the aircraft’s flight path, I can tell that the pilot flying the airplane is dealing with more instability than in a normal approach,” said Meikle. “But in a side-stick situation, it’s very difficult to sense what the other crewmember is doing as their hand movements are much smaller and the side-stick is out of the normal field of view. By using the two different platforms in the study, we’ll see if that factor influences the go-around decision-making process.”

Another interesting comparison will be the difference in go-around tendencies between the Citation pilots and Gulfstream crews. Besides the single-pilot/dual-pilot difference, the smaller Citations are about one quarter the weight of a Gulfstream 600 and pilots can make the go-around decision lower and later than Gulfstream pilots.

“It’s going to be a very interesting comparison because the Citation and the G600 are almost the bookends of the business aviation sector,” said Meikle. “There’s real strategy in having the same vendor do both studies because now we’re using the same methodologies with minor variations to accommodate the differences in the fleets, and we may find that one has a particularly unique characteristic that triggers a follow-on study in a different category of airplanes like the super midsize.”

Taking the Data a Step Further

After the study has been completed and analyzed, Presage and FSI will develop course content and scenarios to use exclusively in FlightSafety training. During this phase, FSI will also pull in additional insights gathered from its partnership with GE Digital, which collects and analyzes anonymous and aggregated flight data from more than 300 operators and 1,300 business aircraft.

“We already have some great insight to approach stability and trouble spot airports through the GE Digital partnership that we address in training,” said Meikle. “For example, we’ve seen that sometimes air traffic controllers insist the aircraft maintain higher speeds to the final approach fix. While this helps the controller, it can put the pilot in a less stable position because newer aircraft are very hard to slow down on short final. They can find themselves coming in high and fast which if not managed correctly, or a go-around is not initiated, could result in an overrun of the runway. Now we can focus the training even more precisely on stable approach criteria, and soon we will add the psychology of the go-around decision by combining the insights from GE Digital data analysis of actual flights with the results of the Presage go-around studies. All this will further enhance the effectiveness of FlightSafety training.

“By better preparing pilots to manage situations they may experience in the real world, we’re enhancing aviation safety,” said Meikle. “If just one crew makes the go-around decision that they might not have done otherwise—resulting in a non-event instead of a runway excursion with potentially catastrophic consequences—then we’ve done our job and every penny we’ve invested in the Presage studies and the GE Digital Partnership will be worth it.”