Over the years, I’ve cancelled several planned flights, answering the go/no-go question in the negative. Many other flights got rescheduled and were completed—either earlier or later than the original plan—while only a handful were attempted but never completed, at least not in keeping with the original plan. Weather has been the most frequent reason for an outright cancellation with my personal fatigue coming in a close second, followed in distant third place by mechanical reasons. Considering we’re talking about hundreds of takeoffs and thousands of flight hours, that’s not a bad record.
What’s missing from this summary is the number of flights that didn’t proceed as planned, those completed more or less on the same schedule envisioned days before takeoff, but perhaps not at the same altitude, over the same route or even under the same flight rules. And in fact, some flights began not so much with a firm “go” decision to depart and complete the flight, but with a shoulder-shrugging decision to take off and “see how it goes.” In other words, for some flights, a series of go/no-go decisions were made, with some of them decided in the negative. All of which is to argue that there’s usually no single, all-encompassing “go” decision, and even the “no-go” decision can be reversed. In other words, we rarely make a single go/no-go decision, but a series of them. And we usually reevaluate our choices multiple times each flight. How and when we do that is itself a field of study, known as aeronautical decision-making.
