Failure to Mitigate

The Flight Safety Foundation has analyzed the past 16 years of aircraft accident data and found that the most common type of accident is the runway excursion, which accounts for 33 percent of all aircraft accidents.¹ The highest risk factor for runway excursions is the unstable approach.² Unstable approaches occur on 3.5 to 4.0 percent of all approaches, but only 3 percent of these unstable approaches result in a go-around being called in the cockpit: almost all aircrew in this state — 97 percent — continue to land. It can be argued, therefore, that the almost complete failure to call go-arounds as a preventive mitigation of the risk of continuing to fly approaches that are unstable constitutes the number one cause of runway excursions, and therefore of approach and landing accidents. If our go-around policies were effective even 50 percent of the time, the industry accident rate would be reduced 10 to 18 percent. There is no other single decision, or…