Missed Approach Discretion is certainly the better part of aeronautical valor.
By Richard L. Collins September 2008
A lot of pilots saw some impressive video of a German Airbus airline crew trying to land in a horrendous crosswind. Other than the wind, the weather was good. The crab angle on final was substantial and the turbulence enthusiastic. It turned into quite a tussle over the runway as the pilot tried to land. There was obviously more crosswind than control authority, and at one point it appeared that the downwind wingtip might have scraped on the runway. Finally, the pilot abandoned the approach and sought out a runway more nearly aligned with the fierce wind.
The news reports lauded the pilot for his flying skill, and that's fine. But I had to wonder what he was thinking about as he pressed on into that approach. If it looked bad on video, it must have really looked bad from the cockpit. The pilot did finally become a wise man when he elected to abort the landing.
In aviation we have always embraced variable terminology. Some would call this a go-around, some would call it a missed approach, and others might call it an aborted or rejected landing. Generally a go-around is thought of as a VFR maneuver and a missed approach an IFR maneuver. I guess a rejected landing would be one abandoned at the last minute and an abort would come after the wheels have touched down. Whatever, the decision-making becomes critical when things are not going well during the approach and landing phase of flight.
There have recently been a number of accidents, serious and otherwise, where a missed approach would have taken, and perhaps kept, the airplane out of harm's way. Certainly when we look at accidents during this phase of flight it is possible to identify a point where it was obvious that things were going bad.
Stabilized approaches, with everything configured for landing, with the airplane smoothly tracking the localizer and glideslope, and with the speed on Vref, are holy in turbine airplane operations. It is generally held that the approach should be stabilized at 1,000 feet if in instrument conditions and at 500 feet if in visual conditions. This is fine and necessary in heavier airplanes, and there is a long history of unstabilized approaches leading to accidents. Over a third of airline accidents occur when the crew fails to abort an unstabilized approach. Certainly any approach that involves substantial changes in power, attitude or heading below those guideline altitudes is a bad one.
Using those guidelines it is possible to make an early decision on a missed approach. If things are not stabilized at that specified point on an approach, miss it and try again. Pilots, though, often tend to press on and try to patch things up. That's bad because the later you wait to start a missed approach, the more lethal the outcome can be. This can be as true in light airplanes as in heavier ones, but light airplanes are more often operated on runways that are substantially longer than necessary. Still, light airplanes are damaged or destroyed during landings that follow approaches that should have been missed.
Two accidents on the same runway, 24, at Carlsbad, California, bear an eerie similarity right up until the last, where the outcome delivers a strong message on this subject. Information is from the NTSB reports on the accidents.
Both airplanes were Citations, one a 560 and one a 510 (Mustang). The 560 had a crew of two, the 510 was single pilot. There were pilot factors in both cases. The captain of the 560 had type 2 diabetes (not reported to the FAA) and post-accident toxicology testing was consistent with an elevated average blood sugar level over the previous several months. On this flight, the 510 pilot had experienced avionics problems and an autopilot outage, and noted "that he was overwhelmed with the electrical failures and fatigued from maneuvering the airplane by hand for such a long duration (which he approximated was about 45 minutes)."
In both cases the pilot approached the 4,897-foot-long runway high and fast and there was a tailwind component for the 560 landing.
Both airplanes landed approximately halfway down the runway. The 510 pilot determined that he wasn't going to be able to stop within the confines of the runway and that he wouldn't be able to abort the landing because of diminished speed, so he elected to try a groundloop. The airplane came to rest south of the runway with the main gear collapsed, the flaps folded under the wings, and with the four people on board uninjured.
