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Go-Around and Rejected Landing

A go-around is not what you do when you have failed. It is a normal maneuver with three steps in a fixed order, and the hard part is not flying it — it is deciding early enough to fly it.

Takeoffs, Landings and Go-Arounds — FI.VII.N

Why you have this maneuver

You will fly bad approaches. Some will arrive high, some fast, some out of configuration or drifting off the centerline. That is normal, now and for the rest of your flying life. The problem is only ever what you do next.

Sometimes the approach is fine and the runway is not. There is an airplane still on it, or a vehicle, or a deer, or a controller who changed their mind. There is windshear, wake turbulence from the jet ahead, an obstacle you saw too late to out-climb. All leave you the same option, always available: you can go around.

What gets pilots hurt is the salvage attempt — continuing to work an approach that has already gone wrong, because abandoning it feels like conceding something. The assumption underneath is that a rejected landing is always the consequence of a poor approach, and a poor approach always the consequence of insufficient experience or skill. That is not true. One honest qualifier: a few situations put a clock on the decision — minimum fuel, an engine running rough. Everywhere else, when the safe outcome of the landing is in doubt, go around.

The two reasons pilots wait too long

Delay is what kills, because the most critical go-arounds happen close to the ground where there is little altitude and little time. The Airplane Flying Handbook names two sources of that delay, and both are in your head rather than in the airplane.

The first is landing expectancy — the anticipatory belief that conditions are not as threatening as they really are and that this approach is surely going to end in a safe landing. You have been aiming at that runway for three miles and your brain has already filed the outcome. The fix is worth adopting on every approach you fly: go down final assuming you are going around, and let the landing be the surprise.

The second is pride — the mistaken idea that going around admits you failed to fly the approach properly. Nobody watching thinks that.

Deciding is easier against a standard than against a feeling. A stabilized approach means the airplane is on the correct glidepath, at a constant and appropriate airspeed, in the landing configuration, and at a proper descent rate. Too much energy shows up as float and a long touchdown, too little as sink and a dragged-in final. When that balance is lost, so is the approach.

Flying it: power, attitude, configuration

Three things happen, quickly, and in this order. The order is not a preference — taking them out of sequence is how the maneuver goes wrong.

Power

Advance the throttle smoothly but without hesitation to takeoff or maximum allowable power. Power comes first because power is what stops the descent. Smoothly matters: an abrupt handful of throttle makes some engines falter, which is the last thing you need a hundred feet up. Feeding it in a little at a time is the other failure — failure to apply maximum allowable power in a timely manner is one of the named errors for this maneuver, and down near the ground there is no version of the go-around that a partial setting flies. Higher and faster, or in an airplane whose limitations tie power settings to flap position, what you may use is a POH question, so know the answer for your airplane before you need it. The same goes for the propeller control on a constant-speed installation: where it is supposed to be at this point in the approach comes off the before-landing checklist in your POH, and airplanes genuinely differ.

Attitude

Pitch up only enough to stop the descent. Not to climb — to stop going down. The instinct at low altitude is to haul the nose up and get away from the ground, and it is the one that stalls airplanes. An airplane cannot climb until it can fly, and it cannot fly below its stall speed.

Expect the airplane to try to raise the nose for you. It is trimmed for the approach — nose-up, slow — and full power arriving at that trim setting produces a strong nose-up pitching moment that takes firm and sustained forward pressure to hold, stronger still with full flaps. This is the part of the maneuver most likely to hurt you, and there is a trap folded inside it: reaching for the trim to make the pressure go away before the attitude is under control leaves you trimmed to a pitch you did not choose. Fly the attitude with the control first. Once attitude and airspeed are settled, rough-trim to relieve what is left, and save precise trim for when things have stabilized.

If you are slow, lowering the nose briefly to let the speed build can be right — but only when you have height to spend. Close to the ground, or with an obstacle or traffic ahead, there may be no altitude to trade, and the answer is to hold the attitude that stops the descent and let the airplane accelerate from there. Use your POH climb speed — Vx if there is something to clear, Vy otherwise.

Configuration

Only once the climb attitude and power are set do you touch the flaps, and the landing gear after them. Retract the flaps in increments, giving the airplane time to accelerate between them; a sudden full retraction at low speed removes a lot of lift at once and can settle the airplane back onto the ground. The gear waits longer than that. It comes up only once a positive rate of climb is established and there is no longer any possibility of touching down — raise it while the airplane is still settling and you have taken away the thing you would land on. The increments, the speeds, and the point at which the last of the flaps comes up are POH numbers; fly the ones written for your airplane.

Expect yaw and roll to the left as full power arrives at low airspeed. Torque and P-factor are strongest exactly here, so right rudder is part of the maneuver.

Getting out of the way, then talking

If something is on the runway, do not climb straight over it. Offset to the right of it, so the conflict stays visible from the left seat and you are clear of the left-hand pattern and of anything departing beneath you. If you accepted a land-and-hold-short clearance, know before you accept it how you would reject the landing from it. The radio call comes after the airplane is climbing and configured, and the maneuver ends when you are back on downwind with a plan for the next approach.

What the air does to it

Windshear and gusty crosswinds destabilize approaches. A tailwind on final flattens the descent and stretches the landing, and an overshoot is easy to fly from there. Wake turbulence from the aircraft ahead can take away the control authority you were counting on. And density altitude degrades the climb at the moment you are relying on it — full power at a high field on a hot day may not clear what it cleared in winter. Check both before you go: the crosswind calculator for what the wind is doing across the runway, the density altitude calculator for what the air will give back. Either takes seconds.

What goes wrong

The handbook's list of common errors for this maneuver is short. Failing to recognize a condition that warrants rejecting the landing. Indecision, or deciding and then delaying. Failing to apply maximum allowable power in a timely manner, or applying it abruptly. Improper pitch attitude — pitching too high too early, trying to climb before the airplane has the speed to climb, which is the same error as attempting to leave ground effect prematurely. Failing to configure the airplane, so the landing flaps stay hanging and take most of the climb performance you just asked for. Failing to compensate for torque and P-factor, and letting the nose swing left. And, at the end of the list, loss of aircraft control.

Every one of those is a decision made too late or a step taken out of order. That is the whole maneuver: decide early, then power, attitude, configuration.

Where you meet it next

On the checkride the examiner will ask for a go-around, often from an uncomfortably low altitude, and what is really being graded is how long you take to start it. Expect it again unannounced during a landing task — the point is not that you can perform the procedure but that you will choose it.

The same reflex belongs in every landing lesson, and each one gives it a different shape. Normal approach and landing is where the stabilized-approach standard you are judging against comes from. Short-field approach and landing is where arriving fast turns into float you have no room for. Soft-field approach and landing is where a balloon in ground effect invites you to salvage instead of reject. Power-off 180 is an approach you cannot re-power, so the judgment has to happen early or not at all. Forward slip to a landing is a way of losing height that has to be finished before the flare, and knowing when it will not be is the same call. The low-altitude nose-up stall this maneuver is built to avoid is the one you go and meet on purpose in power-on stalls. All of them sit alongside this one in the maneuvers track.