ALAR (Approach-and-Landing Accident Reduction)

Approach-and-Landing Accident Reduction (ALAR) is the name of both a problem and the safety program built to attack it. The problem is that the approach and landing phases account for a disproportionate share of fatal accidents even though they represent only a small fraction of total flight time. The program is the body of work produced by the Flight Safety Foundation's international ALAR Task Force, culminating in the ALAR Tool Kit published in 1998.

The Task Force grounded its recommendations in data rather than opinion. Its analyses drew on hundreds of fatal approach-and-landing accidents from the 1980s and 1990s involving turbine aircraft, detailed case studies of accidents and serious incidents, and audits of thousands of line flights. From that evidence it identified recurring causal factors: unstabilized approaches, inadequate crew coordination and monitoring, poor decision-making about whether to continue or go around, loss of situational awareness relative to terrain, and omission of, or failure to respond to, terrain-awareness warnings.

The Tool Kit translates those findings into practical, usable material. Its core is a set of ALAR Briefing Notes, a collection of roughly three dozen short documents that each address one contributing factor, such as descent-and-approach profile management, altimeter setting, being prepared to go around, or crosswind and wet-runway landings. Alongside the briefing notes the kit provides approach-and-landing risk-awareness checklists, an approach-and-landing risk-reduction guide, and awareness presentations designed for crew-room and classroom use. A central organizing idea running through the whole kit is the stabilized approach: the aircraft should be in the correct configuration, on the correct path, at the correct speed, and with power stabilized by a defined gate on the approach, and if those criteria are not met, the correct action is a go-around rather than an attempt to salvage the landing.

ALAR's influence on modern operations is broad even where the name is not visible. The stabilized-approach concept and mandatory go-around callouts that now sit in most operators' standard operating procedures, and the emphasis on approach briefings, monitoring, and terrain awareness, trace directly to this work and to parallel controlled-flight-into-terrain reduction efforts. The Tool Kit remains publicly available and is still widely referenced, and its logic is echoed in later industry and regulator guidance on go-around decision-making and unstable-approach management.

For a training organization, the value of ALAR is that it packages the accident record into concrete, teachable rules for the single most accident-prone part of every flight. It is not a regulation, so it carries no compliance obligation of its own; it is a distilled body of professional practice that operators adopt voluntarily and adapt into their own procedures. Because ALAR predates and complements formal safety management systems, its briefing notes make excellent source material for the training and standard-operating-procedure content that an SMS then monitors and improves.

A flight school lives in the approach-and-landing environment. Every circuit, every touch-and-go, every stage check, and every checkride ends in the exact phase ALAR was written about, and students accumulate more approaches per flight hour than almost any other operation. That makes the ALAR material unusually well matched to primary and instrument training: the stabilized-approach gate, the discipline of a briefed go-around, and the crosswind and wet-runway briefing notes are not abstractions for a school, they are the daily curriculum.

The practical opportunity for an ATO or flying club is to convert ALAR principles into house standards early, so that stabilized-approach criteria and a no-fault go-around culture are habits by solo rather than corrections added later. Baking a defined approach gate and mandatory go-around callout into the syllabus and into instructor standardization gives students the same decision framework the airline world uses, and it directly reduces exposure to runway excursions and controlled-flight-into-terrain, the two consequence categories ALAR was built to prevent.

Aviatize's Training Management module lets a school turn ALAR principles into explicit, gradable syllabus items, so stabilized-approach criteria, go-around decision-making, and approach briefings are trained and assessed lesson by lesson rather than left to chance. Ground Training & Checking supports the briefing-note theory and standardization content, keeping every instructor teaching the same approach gates and callouts.

When an unstable approach or salvaged landing is observed or reported, Safety Management captures it as a hazard or occurrence and feeds it back into the training program, while KPI Reporting & Dashboards can track go-around rates and approach-related events across the fleet so the school can see whether its ALAR-based standards are actually changing behavior.