Right Seat

When you’re young and invincible, it’s always other people who make mistakes. One of my first students brought me back down to earth and taught me a good lesson in how complacency and having a high-flying ego can lull you into trouble. We were bouncing around to different grass strips in the area, practicing approaches at unfamiliar airports. On the final stop, my student was a little fast on the approach, but not alarmingly so. We floated past the threshold of the runway, then past the first third. I was still feeling good about the landing until we floated past the halfway point. That’s when it finally started to click that something was wrong. We finally touched down in the final two-thirds of the relatively short strip. I helped get on the brakes hard as the fence loomed in the windshield. At that point all we could do was wait.

I suppose this would be a great story if I said we had to shut down and push the airplane back to turn around. But the truth is that we had a few feet to spin around and taxi back. It was still close enough to take a spot on my “stupid pilot tricks” list.

Given that it was just a country barbed-wire fence, we hadn’t been in any physical danger, but my lack of judgment almost resulted in an incident, and no doubt would have left me without a job and with a student who was scared to fly. It’s self-evident that all this could have been avoided, and the student would have learned a much better lesson, had we just gone around.

Although maybe a bit head-scratching, it isn’t a big mystery why we continue to push it and not take the easy option of going around. There are many reasons. Everything we do in an airplane can be graded on a continuum. A perfect approach and landing, one that requires a bit more finesse to pull off, and one that’s too fast and puts you more than halfway down the runway are all fairly close—not to mention subjective. Being only five knots fast on one approach might not matter, but 10 knots could make the difference between being able to turn around before the fence and losing your job after you go through it.

It’s easy to combat this problem by establishing some hard rules. If you haven’t landed in the first third of the runway, go around. If you are more than five knots fast after you cross the numbers, go around. If you see all white or red on short final, go around. Take the judgment, emotion, and subjectivity out of the equation and simply follow the rules. Many airlines specify stabilized approach criteria that lists a group of factors that must be met for an approach to continue. This sort of additive mindset could be critical to increasing the safety and utility of light aircraft.

Following hard criteria that must be met to continue an approach is a lot healthier than trying to do what most of us do, which is to simply continue trying to salvage the approach until well after it’s obvious to everyone but us that going around is the right decision. Pilots tend to be mission-oriented people, and not continuing an approach seems like an admission of failure. Which, obviously, it is not.

This month Technical Editor Jill W. Tallman tackles the ins and outs of go-arounds in “Change Your Mind” beginning on page 42. It’s a wonderful overview of a simple maneuver and the necessary mindset that hopefully will have us all going around a lot more.

I tend to look at go-arounds in a much more glass-half-full way these days. Each one results in a few more minutes of flight time, and that’s not a bad thing.