To land, or to go around?

Yeah.

Again, the original post was about a short-ish runway, and the speculation was that they may have bounced or floated really long. It’s in THAT situation that the decision becomes tricky. It’s not about normal go-arounds or T&Gs, which are as you say not particularly hard or dangerous.

In our (bush)flying operation we talk about safe abort and committal points. It’s quite simple.

1. A safe abort point is a physical identifiable location where you should have touched down at or before. For long runways it can be the middle of the runway, but for shorter runways like Spa it might be somewhere between the threshold and 200-300m down the runway. The key is to brief yourself on downwind something along the lines: “If I’m not down and braking abeam the windsock, I’ll go around”.
2. Committal points are positions (usually a distance before a runway threshold) for critical runways where after you will land no matter what happens. So if you approach a sloped runway that will be impossible to out climb during a go-around after a certain point, you brief yourself that after this position you’ll be committed to land.

During PPL training I was never taught this. Committal points are perhaps rare for the majority of airports in Europe, so I get that one. But setting safe abort points is a very wise thing. It makes go around decisions predictable and safe.

The key to success is stable approaches. If you’re always high and land late, work on that. If you’re always on profile but never land the first 200m, your Vref is probably too high. If you always touchdown before your aiming point, it’s good to investigate the root cause of that.

Once approaches are more stable and you happen to float on that windy day in Spa and you haven’t landed at your safe abort point, it’s just a matter of applying power, pitch up simultaneously and set flaps as required.

There should never be a need for a pilot to guess when the time has come to go around. You can just decide that already before entering the circuit pattern.

A few weeks ago I approached an airstrip the way I’ve done it dozens of times. The wind always comes from the same direction, I was stable on approach and confirmed my final checks. Shortly before the threshold something funny happened where I ballooned up and it made me go to idle power to try to fix it. For some strange reason I stayed fairly high and before I knew it I was approaching my safe abort point. This point was 400m beyond the threshold. I was still flying and made an easy decision to go around. This had never happened before! Climb out was shallow and felt a bit weird. I checked my GS and noticed that I had a 12kt tailwind! After the go-around I landed the other direction safely.

@172driver coyotes certainly beats the badgers that made me do a go around on our grass strip.🙂
I agree that one of the main reasons for failed go around is the late decision to do so.
I also read (sorry Peter) an article in Flyer from an instructor (I think he is or was) Nigel Webb who lamented on how when he did control flights, how many pilots did not know how to do one properly. I have to say the method he described is somewhat different to the method we carry out here, in its order of events.
@maxbc I don’t see how your argument holds up. When you take off you go from zero to Vr + or V1 when your wheels actually leave the ground. That might be half way up the runway or it might be further along. When landing you will be carrying some speed. Probably above V1 if you bounce otherwise you probably wouldn’t bounce. In most cases, most pilots can sense whether or not things are going to work out well. We all have our own sense.But personally the last thing on.my mind is whether or not I am ahead or behind the power curve before I change attitude, slam on the power and reduce drag. I will say that if flying a twin with an engine failure after you’ve gone full flaps you put them to one stage first. And if you have carb heat on you might also want to put that away before applying full power.
But these are all things we’ve learnt or taught ourselves in getting familiar with our aircraft.

Just one more remark, regarding original post where this discussion started – EBSP with 800 m asphalt runway (RW05: TORA 799, LDA 716; RW23: TORA 716, LDA 716) is definitely not short runway for PA28. It’s not short runway for the majority of GA aircrafts. There are obstacles but familirization is required and airport is PPR, so a pilot is supposed to know the environment (although that should be usual procedure).

I didn’t start this thread, but @Peter moved one of my posts in the Spa accident thread here and started it

That accident thread went totally off topic, and in a valuable direction, and in such cases I start a new thread, because almost everybody appreciates a new discussion on a nice juicy topic If a thread goes off topic in a non valuable direction then different criteria are used in deciding what to do with it. Sometimes this cannot be done perfectly cleanly, but I always try to do it as best as I can without editing posts.

I also read (sorry Peter)

I don’t know why you say “sorry Peter”.

om an instructor (I think he is or was)

I know him fairly well and I doubt he was, but he is certainly all over UK social media for the past 20-30 years.

Personally, I have done maybe 3 go arounds in my 24 years due to a bad approach and many more due to a runway obstruction. It is much easier in a powerful but well behaved aircraft like the TB20.

Executing a go-around in a twin OEI is highly discouraged and, frankly, borders on suicide. For that reason it’s also not trained, at least not in the US.

Depends which twin and which environment. It’s definitely trained in simulator for some types.

My SOP in the Baron is to go full flaps only when I’m committed to land, i.e. on short final.

Same here for DA42.

Mine too. But there comes that time.
3 times I have had to initiate a “remise de gas” (go around)on descending to around 30ft on short final when someone has not looked or listened and pulled onto the runway at just about the point I was aiming.
So its go around starting with flaps up to the approach setting, level off ,full power Vyse, climb, positive rate gear up, flaps up.
I’ve only trained it OEI in a Sim but trained it a lot so that it is ingrained. I was fortunate in that at the ATO I was with we could use the sim free of charge during downtime.
What I find frightening is that there seems to be a number of pilots who despite saying they looked, cannot see a DA42 arriving at only 20 or 30ft on final.
I asked an instructor about this and he said actually a larger than 30% of the pilot population might not notice it. In human factors theory they show a slide of a city from an aircraft coming into land and take it off after 2seconds and ask you what was wrong there. Apparently, some 30% don’t notice the helicopter in front of them in the picture.

@gallois

I don’t see how your argument holds up.

Now that I think about it something like this happened to me a while ago, which illustrates the problem.

It was early during training, I was doing short solo hops soon after my first solo (I had less than 20 hours). That consisted in going to a nearby airfield with my instructor, and right after doing it again solo.
That time I went to LXFU with 500m DTHR on each side (so the remaining runway for T&G is about 950m, much smaller than my LFPT base). When solo, the aircraft behaves measurably differently from when the FI is there. So, I had just done the T&G with my FI, and was now doing the T&G without him. In this situation, I did not use full flaps (arguably a mistake, but understandable at that level of experience, and I was not told to do so for T&Gs on reasonably long fields). In this situation the aircrafts takes really long to deplete its speed (I think my approach speed was slightly high too). So I remember starting to see the runway being used up as the aircraft was struggling to slow down, and worrying about the trees at the end. I don’t think I ever was in that much danger, but I was still really worried and surprised by the amount of runway used.

From that point on, I always used full flaps when doing solo T&G on a <1000m runway, and I then corrected and better monitored my approach speed.

It’s easy to see how someone may be used to a runway with a certain weight configuration, and, when the aircraft is a lot lighter, float a lot more and take more time to touch down. It could also happen with a different aircraft with different control weights (doing too much flare), or different aerodynamic behavior. We are taught to touchdown at 1.1Vs, so up to that point you can get caught up by not enough runway left (or wildlife etc.) and initiate a go around, which is where it’s really dangerous.

My anecdote was not a bounce but the same problem could happen after a bounce : yes you will have some speed when bouncing, but if you continue the landing you will deplete the speed and eventually touch down at 1.1Vs and have used up a lot of additional runway.

The answer provided by @0fficer is exactly the kind of tool that helps deciding when to safely go-around.