Go Around! Should We be doing More Go Around Procedures? A Report of the Recent Go Around Seminar

Commercial pilots do not often go around when an approach has gone bad. As a matter of fact about 97%  of the time, pilots have tried to salvage a good landing out of a bad approach. From that segment of attempted landings out of bad approaches comes nearly all of the fatal commercial aviation landing disasters. At least that is what seven separate groups of commercial aviation safety researchers have discovered.
Those seven separate and independent research groups presented their papers at the recent Go Around Safety Forum, June 18, 2013 held at EuroControl Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. The Go Around Safety Forum was organized by the European Advisory Committee and the International Advisory Committee of the Flight Safety Foundation and co-sponsored by the European Regions Airline Association and EuroControl. EuroControl is the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, with 39 member nations. See http://www.eurocontrol.int/ .  After working on this joint EAC-IAC project for three years, which included international meetings and a great deal of correspondence, I am pleased to say that all of the formative work, persuading our safety community that we need to look deeper into the issue of go arounds has proven to be well worth the effort manifested today in this highly unique conference. The work of EAC. has been to look ahead and find new ways to dramatically improve commercial aviation safety.



All of the papers presented are now supported by EuroControl Skybrary, an on line reference web site open to all. See http://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Portal:Go-Around_Safety and http://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Portal:Go-Around_Safety_Forum_Presentations.
I would like to recommend the articles concerning flight crew Go Around Procedures Training to all commercial airline safety and training managers to determine how the syllabus at your organization compares. See http://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Go-around_Training
Author and member of European Advisory Committee (EAC) Captain Paul Miller with long time committee member Jean-Jacques Speyer VUB University and current EAC chairman and Eurocontrol Safety Manager Tzvetomir Blajev at the June 18, 2013 Go Around Safety Forum.

Independent Pilot Association representative Captain Cris Simmons (middle) with chairman of the International Advisory Committee Captain Bill Curtis (left) and Captain Martin Smith, PhD, aviation safety researcher, Presage Group (right).

Author with Zeljko Oreski, Executive VP, Int'l Federation of Air Traffic Controllers' Assns (IFATCA).


When airlines write Go Around procedures and then train their flight crew members on how to use them, somehow a disconnect may be happening.  What have here may be a failure to communicate. If only 3 out of 100 pilots is use the going around procedure when the approach goes wrong or as it is referred to in industry terms as "unstable,"  then statistics show that in that pool of the 97% of pilots who try to land, virtually all of the landing mishaps occur that involve runway over runs, excursions off of the side of the runway, short landings into terrain and other structures occur.
In safety terms, this is an area where industry wide, a great improvement in safety can be achieved if flight crew members execute a go around 100% of the time out of an unstable approach and come back around. Why there is a large disparity between what is trained and what done by line pilots is up to each airline to determine and remedy.  The Go Around Safety Forum was intended to bring the issue to the attention of the global commercial aviation community and in that regard it was a successful three year effort, capped off by the successful one day seminar. Now all of the papers, the data and discussion is available to all airlines and it now is up to the local safety managers at each airline to put this information to good use and improve safety.
Flags of the 39 European nations of Eurocontrol.

Does Fatigue Cause an Injury to the Human Body and Mind?

Fatigue: Is It a Stress or a Strain? Is fatigue an injury to the human body from which we need time to recover? Or is fatigue just being tired or over tired, for which a good night’s sleep is the common remedy?
That is the question: is fatigue just a stress on the body and mind and as such something from which the body and mind can bounce back without any damage? Or is fatigue rather something more insidious than just a stress? Is it possible that fatigue is actually a strain, that is to say,  an injury, some kind of damage to the body and mind? If fatigue is an injury to the body and mind, and overstress resulting in a strain, does the the body and mind need time to heal back to health from this injury?
Does repeated stress lead to more damaging strain? Can the road to recovery from the strain of fatigue to the body and mind be a lot longer than just one good night’s sleep?
I am a professional international pilot of 40 plus years, twenty in the US Navy, much of it on carriers with extended hours, much of it at night and twenty at a global package delivery airline, much of it in international operations and much of it at night. I have a degree in liberal arts and a degree in metallurgical engineering. I have no degree in sleep-ology, so any sheep skin focused stickler can stop reading right here.
But I am a human being who has spent many nights and days working multiple shift hours far in excess of any reasonable eight or ten hour schedule, over tired, falling asleep at the switch as the saying goes from fatigue, but trying to do a good job, a necessary job and trying to have a life outside of work at the same time. The one thing that I have noticed is that recovery from fatigue seems to take much more time than just one good night’s sleep. So I began to wonder why? Was I injured and needing to heal? But where was the injury, how can I feel it and how can I measure it? How much time did I need for full physiological recovery of my body and my mind? Was I required to sacrifice the health of my body and my mind for some jobs? If so, how am I being separately compensated for both the work I do and the sacrificing of the health of my body and my mind?
Well again, I didn’t study physiology in college, but I did receive a reasonably good education in flight physiology during these past 40 years and I have read most of what the fatigue and sleep experts have written in industry literature.  It is all good, many studies, great work by some fine people. And I didn't study labor relations and compensation, but I did recognize that there are two issues to working at night and working extended hours repeatedly, the issue of compensation for the work and compensation for the hours past any reasonable shift.
But even then I often come away with more questions fatigue than answers.  What is the pineal gland anyway and how does it work? Does the brain need oxygen and sugar to function? Why does worry have the same affect as caffeine? Why is a hot shower so refreshing when tired? Why do kids fall asleep when tired where ever they sit down? Why do older folks struggle often with sleep?  Why do I feel so tired on weekend layovers that I just want to relax and do nothing stressful, just recover and hope for restful sleep? Why does fatigue knock your brain out like a light switch turning off, even when you are not lying down in bed? How does it know to do that? What else do we not know about fatigue?
So, in my curiosity I harkened back to my university days studying metallurgy. I remembered that we studied the physical relationship between stress and strain on a metal sample and on samples of wood, plastic, ceramics and other material. Stress is the force that is applied to the metal sample and strain is the amount of deformation that occurred to the sample piece as a result of the stress.
What we found was that for the most part, metals deform elastically under lower levels of stress and essentially return to their original shape, size and strength. This means that the stress is borne by the material and it springs back into its original being.
In physiology terms, we might say that one all nighter isn’t so bad; just get a good night’s sleep and you will bounce back, good as new and be ready to go just fine. Probably all true, especially so for lab studies.
Now back to the metal samples. As we continue to add stress to the metal samples, somewhere down the line we get strain that is no longer elastic. The sample now begins to deform. It is still strong and has some of its original strength, but it has become bent, stretched and weakened.  The stress that was put on the sample past the elastic strain point damaged the sample. It is deformed plastically, that is, it will no longer spring back into it’s original size, shape and strength.  Moreover, if the stress is continually applied, not only does the strain become a deformation in size, shape and strength, the sample will eventually break, fail and just come apart, often with a very loud bang.

Now, back to the human physiology story. Again I am not an expert, but I wondered if the human body and mind did not react in a similar manner, that is to say, that the body and mind can take some stress, some sleeplessness, and bounce back elastically with just a good night’s sleep.
But what happens to the human body and mind when the stress of sleeplessness is applied continuously, and applied over the ability to take this stress undamaged? Can the stress eventually cause a strain, that is, damage to the body and mind, damage that one good night’s sleep is insufficient time in which to recover? Can we over stress the body and mind with fatigue? Can fatigue be damage that affects the body and mind such that it is injured and needs time to recover from the injury?
I don’t know the answers to all of these questions. But I believe that these questions need to be asked. Is fatigue more of a strain at some point that just a stress? Can we do injury to our bodies and minds by stressing them with fatigue to the point that they are damaged in some manner and no longer function well? Can this damage be such that one good night’s sleep is insufficient in which to recover? Have we broken something that needs mending? Have we injured something in ourselves which needs recovery?
Is fatigue more of a strain than a stress?