Go-Around / Rejected Landing

A go-around is the transition from a descending approach or a landing attempt back to a climb. It can be initiated anywhere from short final to after the wheels have touched, and the decision to reject a landing is as important as the mechanics of flying it. Common triggers include an unstable or too-fast approach, an unexpected obstruction or aircraft on the runway, wind shear or a gust that destabilizes the flare, a bounced or ballooned landing that cannot be salvaged, a runway-incursion hazard, or an ATC instruction to go around.

The procedure follows a consistent flow — power, pitch, configuration — flown in that order. First, the pilot applies takeoff or full power to arrest the descent and begin acceleration; the airplane will yaw with the sudden power and high angle of attack, so right rudder is needed in most single-engine airplanes. Second, the pilot pitches to the go-around attitude to establish a climb, resisting the temptation to over-rotate before the airplane has accelerated. Third, the pilot reconfigures on a schedule: retract flaps in stages to a positive-climb setting rather than all at once (dumping full flaps abruptly can cause a sink), retract landing gear once a positive rate of climb is confirmed, and continue the flap retraction to the clean configuration as airspeed builds. Throughout, the airplane is flown in the region of reversed command near the ground, so precise pitch and power control matter — this is a high-workload, low-altitude, high-angle-of-attack regime where inadvertent stalls and loss of directional control are real hazards. Once established in the climb, the pilot follows the missed-approach or traffic-pattern path, communicates as required, and sets up for the next attempt.

Under the FAA Airman Certification Standards, the go-around/rejected landing is a task in the Takeoffs, Landings, and Go-Arounds area of operation (Area IV) of the private pilot standard (FAA-S-ACS-6), and the FAA Airplane Flying Handbook (FAA-H-8083-3) treats it in its Approaches and Landings chapter. The ACS emphasizes timely decision-making, the correct power-pitch-configuration sequence, positive climb performance, and coordinated flight.

The deeper principle is that the go-around is the ever-present alternative to a bad landing. Stabilized-approach criteria — target airspeed, descent rate, configuration, and alignment established by a defined gate on final — exist precisely so that a pilot has a clear, pre-briefed trigger to go around when the approach falls outside them. A pilot who treats the go-around as a routine, well-practiced option rather than an admission of failure is far less likely to force an unsalvageable landing, which is one of the strongest defenses against runway excursions and hard landings.

For a flight school, the go-around is both a maneuver and a mindset the school is trying to instill. Instructors work to remove the psychological reluctance to go around — the sense that it signals a failed approach — because that reluctance is what leads students, and later certificated pilots, to salvage landings they should have abandoned. Pairing go-around training explicitly with stabilized-approach criteria gives the student a concrete decision rule instead of a judgment call made under stress, and that rule-based discipline is exactly what aeronautical decision-making training aims to build.

The go-around also has a safety-data dimension. Balked landings, bounced-landing go-arounds, and low-altitude go-arounds are moments of elevated risk, so a school benefits from tracking how consistently its students initiate go-arounds when appropriate and flagging any events — a late go-around, a hard landing that should have been rejected — for review. That feedback loop connects individual training records to the school's broader safety management, turning near-events into curriculum improvements rather than isolated incidents.

Aviatize's training management module lets a school grade the go-around and rejected landing as a defined syllabus objective — decision timing, the power-pitch-configuration flow, and climb performance — and record it alongside a student's stabilized-approach performance, so instructors can see whether the student is applying a clear go/no-go rule on final rather than forcing marginal landings. That record supports solo-authorization and stage-check decisions with real evidence.

When a training flight produces a balked or salvaged landing worth reviewing, Aviatize's safety management module lets the school capture it as a reportable event and connect it back to instruction, so patterns across students feed the school's risk assessment and standardization rather than being lost after the debrief.