Page 31 - Twin and Turbine June 2017

Good work, you just did a missed approach/go around. Maybe it was the first one this year, maybe the first one in this airplane, maybe the first real one, ever. You’re on your way around the radar pattern or to the alternate. Look around. You will have missed something not directly addressed by a checklist: landing lights, deice equipment, spilled your coffee, something. Fix it. Look at your fuel again. Re-calculate for the radar pattern or the trip to the alternate. It’s been busy so far, but if your fuel-math is wrong and one or two motors cough because of it, that will be what busy really feels like.
But your math was good. Take breath No. 2, ask your partner how your hair looks. The go-around procedure for your jet most likely has similarities to the one above. In the Guppy, you’d better add a step to trim nose-down somewhere very early in the procedure after you TOGA. Unlike the Duke, F-16 or the MD-80, the 737’s wing mounted engines will pitch the nose to the moon as they spool up. As that happens, the airspeed will drop like a Cessna 150 in a 30-degree climb. One night last
month, at Washington Reagan, that was an issue I encountered and it almost precipitated another. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Like a Nightmare
The go-around litany sounds straightforward. It’s not rocket science or brain surgery, but holy cow. Can you say “busy?” And how often do we get that busy, that quickly, at the end of a flight, probably in the weather, perhaps at the end of a long day, and perhaps late at night.
And how often do we perform the maneuver? After 23,000 hours, other than in the sim and for practice, I’ve flown a go-around in the military, GA and Part 121 combined, maybe a dozen times. And I’ve learned that it’s this infrequency that generates the stories we read about when a go-around doesn’t “go around” very well. A windshield full of bad can be in your face if you allow yourself to be caught by surprise.
Memorizing a missed approach/ go-around litany, and thinking about it
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