Safety
Safety Forum: Too Few Go-arounds Executed
Pilots need to be willing to accept a missed approach

No one who flies has ever questioned the safety benefits of a stabilized final approach, whether it’s in VFR or IFR weather. Most airline and business aviation operators define a stabilized approach as one in which the aircraft is properly configured–on airspeed and on altitude–no closer to the ground on final than 500 feet. Anything else essentially demands a missed approach–a go-around in pilot vernacular–or at least it should. The July 6 crash of an Asiana Boeing 777 at San Francisco International Airport already appears to be one more statistic in a long string of accidents in which a failure to execute a go-around is the final link to snap in the accident chain of events.