Anyone ever experience a "Missed Approach" on an airplane?

In My Humble Opinion
81

Cartooniverse,

On the topic of “holding passengers prisoner”.

The point to remember is that, unlike almost all other consumer purchases and event in daily life, riding on a plane is a 100% group effort. We all leave at once and we all arrive at once, period. At the mall, or even in a theater, you can get up and leave without impacting the other customers.

If we’ve left the gate and are waiting to take off, there’s no physical way to let you off without going back to the gate, thereby inconveniencing the other 50-400 customers who’re wanting to stay on. We do what’s best for everyone, and this is one example where you can’t “have it your way”.

If you charter the whole airplane, then you CAN have it your way; we’ll taxi back and forth as much as you want. Because you’re THE customer. Want us to wait an hour while you have an extra drink in the bar? No problem, boss. I often haul sports teams on charters. We go when they’re ready, not when we originally said we wanted to.

But when you’re one of a couple hundred, who of physical necessity must be treated exactly the same, well then you’re A customer. As Captain, I see my “virtual customer”, made up of all 200+ of you as a group. When the group wants to depart, that’s what I do.

Now you may not like that. You may protest “it isn’t fair.” Well how fair would it be to the other 199 people whoe don’t want to arrive 30-40 minutes later because of you? That’s the dilemma I face.
So far I’ve been talking about a scenario where we’ve left the gate. A similar situation is where we’re still at the gate, delayed for weather or mechanical or whatever.

If we’ve boarded everybody & closed the door, we’ve completed all the security checks too. That means that if you get off and have checked baggage, we need to pull your checked baggage off the plane too. That can take 5 guys 30 minutes of rummaging around in the pile in the belly to find your bag. And I and the rest of my 200 customers cannot leave the gate until we find your bag.

No checked bags you say? Good. Another common scenario is that we’re held up for weather, not so much here as enroute or at the destination. ATC gives us an estimate of how long the wait will be. Anyone who’s flown much knows that’s a guess, subject to large revision either way.

If they tell us it’ll be 45 minutes and 15 minutes later say we can go, we’ve got about 10 minutes to get underway or we lose the slot in the sky with our name on it. It’s definitely a “hurry up and wait, then rush like mad” scenario. If we let people off for a smoke or whatever, and we get the call to go, we’ll miss the slot & everybody waits even longer for the next one. So we tend to try to keep everone on the plane if at all possible.

I mentioned before that passengering is a group effort, where we manage the aircraft for the group, not the individual. The same thing is happening on a meta level. FAA HQ is managing the entire air system for the benefit of total system throughput, and the wants and needs of individual aircraft (i.e. me) don’t matter much.

The “hurry up & wait then rush like hell” isn’t easy for me either as an individual aircraft with individual desires, but I’m aware that maximizing system throughput accrues the most benefits to the most people most of the time. I never know about the times I have an undelayed lfight where somebody else waits 20 minutes so I can go through. But I know, statistically, that it happens. So I accept my turn in the barrel like a professional, and like an adult.
Now turning from the practical to the legal …

By Federal law, the Captain and crew are in charge of the airplane and passengers. By getting on, you’re surrendering some of your civil rights to a (generally) benign absolute dictatorship under me. Sounds harsh, but it’s a legal fact.

By Federal law, if you choose not to cooperate with my crew, we will politely inform you to calm down and remember where you are. If that doesn’t work and you persist in being a problem that appears to impact the safety or security of my other 200 customers, then things get interesting. You cease to be a customer in our eyes, we go back to the gate & you get to talk to the nice folks from the local cops or FBI. Downtown.

I have 200 other lives to protect and you’re become part of the problem, not part of the solution. I cannot permit that to contiue.

We’re not cops and we do’t have a cop attitude. But not cooperating with an airline crew is about the same as lipping off to a cop. You’re playing with fire, and when non-cooperation turns into refusal to comply we’re off to the races and you lose. Every time.

Harsh, but true.

82

That should have been addressed to Cardinal, not Cartooniverse.

83

I’ve gotta dash now, but I’ll write a piece tomorrow on the horror stories you sometimes see in the press.

Sometimes decent crews trying to do the right thing end up painting themsleves into a real corner and then from there it degenerates into stupidity, which violates legitimate passenger interests and gives everyone involved a bad experience, and gives the carrier a (deserved) black eye in the press.

84

I have had the pleasure of experiencing two missed approaches and both of them were in the same flight. I was returning to Buffalo from Atlanta. As we approached Buffalo, I noticed that there was a really dense fog. That approach was aborted due to low visibility. The pilot said that we would re-route to Rochester. The flight was already late getting in and none of us wanted to be in Rochester at 11 PM.

So, we take the short flight to Rochester, the plane starts to land again, gear is down, no visibility problems…then we take off again. Needless to say, the passengers were not happy. The pilot informed us that as he approached, he saw that the runway was under construction. Seems like ATC should have known that. :dubious:

So, now we’re off to Syracuse. Finally we land there at midnight. However, the Syracuse airport didn’t know we were coming, so they wouldn’t let us deplane for about an hour. When they let us off, several of us high-tailed it to the rental cars. Luckily, they wre just closing and I was able to get a car and drive back to Buffalo.

The worst part of this whole thing was that my mother was tracking my progress on the airline’s website. When we diverted to Rochester, the website told her that the flight was diverted, but not to where. When we diverted again to Syracuse, the website just dropped our flight. When she searched for it, the site would return “no flight found”. To compound her anxiety, this was only a few months after 9/11.

85

Delayed two hours leaving Ft Lauderdale, FL, flying to Dallas to connect to final destination LAX. Pilot sick we were told so waiting for new pilot… Already stressed because I’d not make connection and had to rebook DFW to LAX leg of journey. Finally on plane and headed for Dallas. Same experience that many here described. The ground getting closer and closer when suddenly nose goes up and that distinctive push back into seat as ground starts to get smaller and smaller. Pilot comes on to tell us he had to do a fly by the tower to verify the landing gear was down as his indicators were not telling him so. Great, back into landing pattern. Finally land and JUST made connecting flight after taking terminal train to new terminal. That feeling though as we landed hoping the landing gear would not collapse was anxious.

86

After this thread sat quietly for 11 years it’s nice to know another routine flight ended routinely for you four months ago.

87

Flying from Newfoundland to Ottawa in the winter of 1987, we did 4 “almost landed then tried to enter lunar orbit” approaches, due to extreme snow and visibility. We were told that what looked liked visibility windows closed up as we made the “final” approach. We were all pretty scared. On the third try, a sweet little old lady threw up, and that triggered a plane load of puking, with brave attendants asking people if they thought they could spare their barf bag, as supplies were dwindling. The couple across the aisle asked the flight attendant for a blanket, then obviously and loudly joined the Mile High Club. (When we landed, they went their separate ways and each met their earthbound significant other at the luggage carousel with hugs and kisses.) When we finally touched the runway, visibility from the passenger window was zero. Except for about 2 seconds when it cleared to reveal a snowplough heading straight for the side of the plane. We shot by at probably 150 mph and so no big deal :eek: but it didn’t help me feel any better.

Worse was being stuck in the terminal for 3 hours waiting for the delayed flight that contained the flight crew (“Attention everyone, the good news is the flight crew is only 15,000 feet away. The bad news is, that’s 15,000 feet straight up, and we have no idea when they’ll be able to land.”)

I kinda miss train travel. Except for the time we spent 4 hours in the middle of the prairies while a maintenance crew repaired a “sun kink” in the rails. One brave soul jumped off and starting marching through the wheat to a farmhouse barely visible on the horizon. No idea if she made it.

88

Trapped in a plane with zombies! In part of my own making! That will teach me to meddle with forces I cannot begin to comprehend.

89

Was departing Chicago in the early 70’s for Dallas in an AA 707 IIRC ( was big but not jumbo big ), Wx was overcast at about 1000’ as my WAG, was night, 9-10 PM or so.

All was normal until maybe 3-4000 feet still climbing, still had seat belts etc., when suddenly all 4 engines went to flight idle or less, felt/sounded like they were actually starting to unspool, nosed over with zero G feeling as stuff was starting to float up and down we went at what felt like an serious angle.

Passengers were going nuts and all I could think was, "Poor pilot has nowhere to go, “Poor pilot has nowhere to go.” Everything around the airport for miles is aircraft killing ground obstacles and when he saw it at the last seconds was not giving him a chance.

I guess having been flying pipeline for the last few years kept me from thinking about us as passengers and wondering what had gone wrong.

After forever he spooled up and continued a normal climb. OK, I think, what is going on? I thought that since it was probably not a mechanical malfunction, then departure control must have said, :AA Flt XXX, I need you at 3xxx feet NOW!!. and we must have been at 4xxx feet or so to dive that had and for that long to have been needed. ( only maybe 20 years/seconds or so. ) WAG but it was a long time for where we are on departure IMO.

Pilot never made any announcement.

I have been to O’Hare before this and since, both riding and piloting and every time, I look around and and say to myself, “Yeah, he had no where to go if the engines had actually shut down.”

I often wonder why this one time as a passenger I never thought of myself or the other passengers. Maybe I knew I was just along for the ride and all the buck stopping was at the driver and he had not even a ‘lesser of evils’ option. but was focused on doing’.

That is what it is all about when you are the tip of the arrow.

90

Well the nice thing LSLGuy is that you’re still here to see it. I get kinda sad seeing old threads full of people who no longer visit the board for whatever reason.

91

Is Howard Stern still around, I wonder? This thread might need a new analogy for “don’t complain – no one’s forcing you to fly.” :slight_smile:

92

Know it’s a zombie thread, but it is a good one, so I’ll help extend it a bit.

I probably have close to 1,000 takeoffs and landings over my life, and can only think of two incidents, one for takeoff and one landing.

The landing one was in the 1990’s at Lambert St. Louis, at that time a TWA hub and has been mentioned before, fairly nortorious for go-arounds due to having a very busy schedule and only two main (parallel) runways at the time. They used to have a great viewing area (now gone since they built the third runway), and I had seen more than a couple of planes having to divert landings, so when it happened to me (on a 747 coming in from London), I took it in stride, as did most of the passengers as I recall.

The takeoff was last year in Newark, we were on the runway and the pilots started accelerating, then a couple of seconds later came off the power, then a couple of seconds later seemed to go back on power and then came off and pulled back on to the taxiway. Not scary per se, more of a WTF?!? moment. Pilot came on the PA and said the controllers had apparently thought there was something on the runway and stopped the takeoff after it had been cleared…from the pilots’ voice, I gathered he thought the Newark controllers were idiots, but we taxied back to the runway and took off uneventfully.

Considering all the weather I have folown through, I can’t think of any misses due to weather (I can think of a couple diversions and a few landing I wish they hadn’t made, but no go-arounds).

93

There are a lot of pressures on pilots NOT to make missed approaches, and even more so to divert to alternate airports. Wind-shear accidents would have been cut by about 90% if aircraft had just diverted to their declared alternate airports instead of trying to operate with thunderstorms near the airport. But the airline business model couldn’t face that reality, so jets had to keep crashing until Doppler radar came along.

If I pilot does a go-around or diverts to an alternate, it means he has risked a potential black mark on his employment record on behalf of your safety. Shake his hand, say thank you, and offer to buy her a drink.

94

I’ve cancelled the first two attempts I made to reply to this post as they did not comply with SDMB civility policy. I’ll stop with just this:

You are utterly mistaken. Both as to current practice and practice 20-ish years ago.

95

Agreeing with [b[LSL Guy**, for what it’s worth.

96

We had difficulty twice coming in to land, call it what you may but both were at the same airport and it has a history of weather issues; Colorado Springs.

The first was when it was very cloudy and foggy. We tried to descend, couldn’t see a thing out the windows and felt him accelerate and pull up until we were above them again and circled for another approach. A second time the same thing happened, drop, slow, look but never get to any clearing. So the pilot came on and said Folks, we’ll try one more time and then I’m heading to Denver. Obviously this would have been a pain in the butt for everyone but fortunately on that 3rd try right before we landed we broke through and he put it down to the relief and major applause from everyone on the flight.

A second incident happened again at the Springs on a perfectly clear day but with extreme buffeting winds. Anyone who’s every flown in there or tried to land in similar mountainous terrain knows how violent those can be. We dropped to within probably 50 yards of ground but were just getting knocked around from side to side worse than anything I’ve ever experienced, it was like a bad movie. My wife doesn’t tolerate turbulence well and she was ashen. We jerked up, the pilot came on and said he hoped to never go through anything like that again and no way would we circle, we were going straight to Denver. There’s been at least one deadly crash there before so hey, Denver it is.

97

Not true at all, in fact the opposite is the case. Missed approaches are actively encouraged and if you elect to continue an “unstable” approach or disregard the minimum required weather conditions then you risk a black mark against your name.

Any pressure on a pilot to continue an unsafe approach or avoid diverting is coming from within themselves not their employer.

98

Glider pilots never get to go around on a landing. You do it right the first time.

99

If you run out of fuel, you have the same problem but usually with a worse glide ratio and in small planes, no spoilers.

Sailplane experience makes better pilots IMO.

100

Turkish Airlines, from Ankara to Istanbul, winter night with snow starting to come down. Nearly on the runway and then all of a sudden, whoosh, up we go again seemingly almost vertically, and go around for another try. That was exciting, but I’d rather not go through it again.