Three Tries to Land: Lessons in the Art of the Go-Around

Busy traffic pattern provides invaluable experience in balked landings for instrument candidate.

Meg Godlewski

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 at 08:00 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

It’s important to know how and when to perform a go-around. [Credit: Meg Godlewski]

Key Takeaways:

A flight instructor and an instrument candidate experienced extremely busy conditions at a nontowered airport on a clear Sunday, necessitating heightened situational awareness from takeoff through landing.
Due to severe congestion in the practice area and traffic pattern, the instructional flight was forced to execute three go-arounds before successfully landing.
The experience underscored the critical importance of go-arounds as an essential safety maneuver, particularly at pilot-controlled airports, to manage unstable approaches or conflicts with other aircraft.
Despite the challenging circumstances and multiple balked landings, the real-world scenario provided a valuable and realistic learning opportunity for the student pilot.

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I had a pretty good idea what the day was going to be like when we were No. 3 for takeoff at the nontowered airport and it wasn’t quite 10:20 a.m. on a Sunday. The sky over the airport was clear—to the east was a layer of clouds, and to the south a layer of fog.

That bright yellow thing that infrequently appears in the sky over Seattle in the winter was in the sky, and like it always does, brought out the pilots in droves.