Stabilised Approach: The Discipline of the Go-Around

Few operational subjects are as thoroughly documented and as inconsistently executed as the stabilised approach. The criteria exist in every operator's manual. They are briefed, trained, audited and displayed. And still, when the flight data is read after an event, the approach that was unstable at one thousand feet was almost always continued.

This is not a knowledge problem. It is a decision problem.

The gate is a decision, not a checklist item

A stabilised approach gate is an agreement made in advance that at a defined point the flight will be in a defined state, and that if it is not, the approach ends. The value of the gate depends entirely on whether it was decided before the approach began, or negotiated during it.

Crews do not consciously negotiate. What happens is subtler: the gate arrives, the aircraft is slightly high and slightly fast, the runway is in sight, the weather is good, and the crew concludes that it will settle. Nothing in that reasoning is dishonest. It is simply the wrong moment to be making the decision.

Why crews continue

Plan continuation bias is not a character flaw. It is a feature of competent people under workload. Four pressures do most of the damage:

• Sunk cost. The approach has been flown for twenty minutes. Abandoning it feels like wasting work.
• Social expectation. Passengers, schedule, ground staff, the next sector. None of these are aviation arguments, and all of them are present.
• Optimism calibrated by experience. It worked last time. The runway environment is familiar. The aircraft usually settles.
• Momentum. The configuration is set, the checklist is done, and the next action is landing.

The go-around is the only point in normal operations where a crew must actively choose not to continue. That asymmetry deserves explicit training.

A go-around is not an admission that the approach failed. It is the procedure working exactly as designed.

Brief the go-around before the approach

A go-around brief that consists of "standard go-around, we will take the runway heading" is a memory aid, not a decision. An effective brief answers three questions:

1. What triggers the decision here? Name the specific conditions for this approach: the tailwind limit, the visual reference, the point by which the aircraft must be stable.
2. Who calls it? Either pilot, at any time, without discussion. Say it out loud in the brief so that the authority to call is unambiguous.
3. Then what? The missed approach, the re-brief, the fuel check, and the honest conversation about whether a second attempt is the right answer.

The five-hundred-foot sentence

One habit I have found consistently useful is a single spoken sentence at the gate: "Stable, continuing" or "Not stable, going around." Not a discussion, not a debate — a statement of state.

Saying it aloud does two things. It forces the monitoring pilot to form an independent view, and it makes the alternative to continuing audible in the flight deck while there is still time to act on it.

The professional standard

The measure of an operator is not how rarely it goes around. It is whether a go-around is treated as ordinary. When a crew member calls it and the response is "thank you, go-around, flaps twenty", the system is healthy. When the response is a sigh, the system is teaching the next crew to continue.

That culture is built in the simulator, in the briefing room, and in how the report is written afterwards.