Pete Muntean: Aborted Landings Occur at One out of a Thousand Flights

EXCERPT:

MUNTEAN: "It‘s really important to always keep your head on a swivel while flying. And the Southwest crew really needs some kudos here for knowing to make this go-around, this aborted landing. And they‘re so common that NASA even studied aborted landings. They found about — out of about one every 1000 flights of a major U.S. airline in the United States, a go-around happens between an average of one and three times. So if you extrapolate that, 45,000 flights a day on average in the U.S., it means about a dozen or so aborted landings each day. Most of them don‘t really make news because they‘re relatively routine for pilots of all levels. I teach people how to do them early on in their training. It‘s really a pilot‘s ace to play. If you don‘t like the way the landing is set up, you simply don‘t like the way it looks or another airplane is too close for comfort, or there are birds or what have you, you can always go around."