I remember my dad reviewing the flight patterns for go arounds before flying to a new airport. They assign specific go around patterns to avoid interfering with other air traffic.
Better an exciting go-around than ending up 1300 feet off the end of the runway and smashing a couple cars in the process.
Captain Steve had an excellent analysis the other day.
Came in too hot, too fast. Should have got the plane down on the first 1/3 of the runway.
Speed was too high, don’t know why. They may have been getting a tail wind from a micro burst in those dark clouds somewhere behind them.
It was the shortest runway available, but still adequate.
Pilot dove for the deck, flared the plane too high, floated down the runway, losing thousands of feet of available.
The touchdown wasnose gear first. Very bad technique. He was lucky that the plane didn’t start bouncing.
Both main mounts need to be on the runway for the spoilers to deploy to slow the plane down and make the brakes work better, but they went several thousand more feet down the runway with one of the main mounts still dangling in the air, so the spoilers never deployed.
As Captain Steve put it, a lot of holes in that Swiss cheese had to lineup for that accident to occur, and they all lined up.
I’ve been on one go-around. It was in Pisa, Italy in 1977. Huge fog bank hanging over the ground. Smokestacks sticking up through the fog, probably 500 ft stacks. We were flying on top of the fog layer forever. Finally entered the thick fog and a few moments later came out of the bottom. We missed the runway by 100-200 meters off to the right! Ground was probably 50 meters below us. Scared the sh!t out of me.
We went around and, on the same long descent through the fog, I figured I was a goner. If he couldn’t find the runway the first time, how was he going to find it this time? But we descended through the bottom of the fog and the runway was right below us. Everybody cheered.
Almost 50 years ago and I remember it like yesterday.