Inspiring the Decision to Go Around

The first two articles in this series (ASW, 2/13 and ASW, 4/13) described our attempt to begin to understand the psychology of why 97 percent of the time, when flying an unstable approach (UA), pilots do not call a go-around (GA) as a preventative mitigation against approach and landing accidents.¹

Part of Flight Safety Foundation’s 2011 “Go-Around Decision Making and Execution Project” effort, the first article presented a new description of the various facets of this decision making psychology in terms of what we have called the Presage “Dynamic Situational Awareness Model (DSAM).” The second article described a “situated recall” survey experiment in which we asked more than 2,300 pilots worldwide to describe in detail their experiences (thoughts, feelings, actions) in the…