The Go-Around, the Balked Landing, and the Decision Most Checkride Applicants Wait Too Long to Make

A go-around is the maneuver of rejecting a landing you’ve decided not to complete, adding full power, climbing away, and rejoining the traffic pattern to try again. The stick-and-rudder mechanics are simple; the hard part is the decision to abandon a landing before it goes wrong. The most professional pilots go around without hesitation because the go-around costs only a few minutes of flight time while a forced bad landing can cost a bent airplane.

What Is a Go-Around and Why Does It Matter?

A go-around - also called a balked landing or rejected landing - is the decision not to land when landing is the wrong idea, followed by cleanly flying the airplane back up to try again. It appears on every checkride, and it still catches pilots at every experience level.

Landing is the one phase of flight where you deliberately fly close to the ground: slow, in a high-drag configuration, with very little energy in reserve. Altitude, airspeed, and options are the things that make an airplane safe, and during a landing you have traded most of them away on purpose. That is the entire point of landing - but it also means that when something goes wrong down there, you have very little room and very little time.

The go-around exists to give you an out. It is the escape hatch.

How Should You Think About Every Approach?

Build this mindset, because it is exactly what an examiner is looking for: every approach is a go-around that you might decide to convert into a landing - not the other way around. You are not landing until proven otherwise. You are going around until the airplane is on the runway in a position and condition where landing is clearly the safe choice.

That flip in thinking changes everything. A pilot who plans to land and treats the go-around as a backup has already committed emotionally, and will hesitate and try to salvage a bad approach. A pilot who flies every approach ready to reject it already has a hand on the throttle and has already rehearsed the out.

When Should You Go Around?

Notice how many of these reasons have nothing to do with flying poorly:

• The runway is not clear - an aircraft that hasn’t turned off, a deer, a truck, or someone on a lawnmower who didn’t hear your radio call.
• You are not stabilized - too high, too fast, too far down the runway, off centerline, or not configured.
• A gust or wind shear upsets the airplane and you aren’t confident you can put it down safely.
• You balloon on the flare and aren’t sure how much runway you just used.
• The tower tells you to.
• You are closing on a slow-to-clear aircraft ahead of you.
• You just don’t like it - something feels off and you can’t name it yet. That feeling is data. Respect it.

Why Is the Go-Around Worth It?

The go-around is free. It costs you five, maybe ten minutes and a little bit of avgas. That is the entire price.

Compare that to the cost of forcing a bad landing: a prop strike, a collapsed nose gear, a runway excursion into the grass, a bent airplane, an insurance claim, and a report to file. Weighed against five minutes, the math isn’t close. The go-around is the cheapest insurance policy in aviation, and it’s the one pilots are strangely reluctant to buy.

Why Do Pilots Hesitate to Go Around?

Naming the reasons is how you beat them.

Ego. Going around can feel like admitting you got it wrong - especially with someone in the right seat, the tower listening, or friends watching from the ramp.

Plan continuation bias. After flying an approach for two minutes, your whole brain is organized around landing. Reversing that decision at the last second is genuinely hard, because your mind keeps insisting it will work out with just a little more.

No decision made in advance. This is the big one. If you haven’t defined - before the approach - exactly what a good approach looks like and exactly when you’ll abandon it, you’re trying to make a complex safety decision in the worst possible three seconds: low, slow, task-saturated, with the ground rushing up.

How Do You Use the Stabilized Approach to Decide?

The stabilized approach is your decision tool. It turns the go-around from a panicked reaction into a calm, pre-briefed choice.

A stabilized approach means that by a certain gate on final, everything is set. For most light singles on a visual approach, that gate is around 500 feet above the ground. By that gate you want to be:

• On the correct final approach path, on centerline or correcting to it
• At your target approach speed, give or take a small margin
• In your intended landing configuration with the flaps you plan to use
• With power set and only small adjustments needed
• In trim

If you reach that gate and any of these is meaningfully wrong - and you can’t fix it with a small, smooth correction - you go around. You do not negotiate. You do not give it another five seconds. You made the hard decision earlier, when your brain was calm. Now you’re just executing a rule you already agreed to.

Talk it out loud on final: on speed, on centerline, on glidepath, configured. If one of those isn’t true and won’t become true, the next words out of your mouth are “going around.”

How Do You Fly the Go-Around Cleanly?

The decision is only half of it. The checkride tests both. Once you decide, commit and follow the sequence:

1. Power first. Smoothly but positively to full power (or takeoff power for your airplane). In most trainers, confirm carburetor heat is cold so warm, less-dense air doesn’t rob you of power when you need every horse.
2. Control the pitch. Full power on a fixed-pitch, high-thrust-line trainer makes the nose pitch up, and you’re likely trimmed for a low approach speed, which makes the pitch-up stronger. Push as needed, set a positive climb attitude, and trim off the pressure. If the nose comes way up while you’re slow and dragging full flaps, you’re flirting with a stall where you have the least room to recover.
3. Arrest the descent and establish the climb. Confirm a positive rate - vertical speed climbing, altimeter climbing, ground falling away.
4. Retract flaps in stages. Dumping all the flaps at once close to the ground causes a sink you do not want ten or twenty feet up. Retract from full to an intermediate setting, let the airplane accelerate and keep climbing, then milk the rest of the flaps up once you have a positive rate and building airspeed. Exact settings vary - check your POH and how your instructor teaches it.
5. Handle the gear last (retractable). In most airplanes: flaps to the initial setting, confirm a positive rate of climb, then gear up. Be climbing before you commit the gear, so if something isn’t right you still have wheels underneath you.
6. Fly the airplane and communicate. Track the extended centerline - don’t drift over the parallel taxiway or into a nearby pattern - climb at the appropriate speed, rejoin the pattern like any other departure, and make your radio call: “going around.” That lets everyone else rebuild their picture of where you are.

The universal principle: power, pitch, positive climb, then clean up in stages - never all at once down low.

What Do Real Go-Around Scenarios Look Like?

Scenario 1 - Traffic slow to clear. You’re nicely stabilized on short final, but the aircraft that landed ahead is still rolling out and the gap is closing. Don’t sit there hoping. Power up, go around, and offset slightly to the side of the runway so you can keep the other airplane in sight as you climb over and past. You removed yourself from any chance of a collision for the price of one lap around the pattern.

Scenario 2 - Balloon on a gusty crosswind. You cross the threshold, start your flare, and a gust lifts the upwind wing and balloons you fifteen feet up - slow, crossed up, runway sliding underneath. Your instinct may be to push the nose down and salvage it. Don’t - that’s how you arrive nose-first and bounce or worse. Balloon plus uncertainty equals go around. Power in, level the pitch, fly away, and set it up again.

Scenario 3 - The nagging feeling. Everything looks fine and the numbers are good, but something feels off and you can’t point to a single broken parameter. Go around anyway. Good judgment includes acting on that quiet alarm before it has evidence to show you. The best pilots have all gone around for reasons they couldn’t fully explain until they were safely climbing away.

What Does the Examiner Grade on a Go-Around?

This maneuver is in the Airman Certification Standards (ACS), and examiners look for four things:

1. Prompt recognition and action - no long, deer-in-the-headlights pause.
2. A correct, smooth sequence - power, pitch, positive climb, flaps in stages.
3. Aircraft control throughout - airspeed doesn’t decay and the nose doesn’t balloon while you’re heads-down fumbling for the flap lever.
4. Situational awareness - track the centerline, avoid conflicting traffic, and make the appropriate radio call.

The mistake that busts more applicants than anything else is not the mechanics - it’s the delay. The examiner calls for a go-around, or sets up a scenario that clearly demands one, and the applicant waits, stares, or tries to land it anyway. That hesitation hands the examiner exactly the evidence they didn’t want to give: reluctance to reject a bad situation.

A quieter version is the applicant who goes around fine because they were told to, but who has never internalized it as their own decision. The examiner is grading whether you own the choice. So if you set up an approach that isn’t stabilized, go around before the examiner has to say anything. A self-initiated go-around on a bad approach is one of the strongest things you can show in the airplane.

The Reframe to Remember

A go-around is not a mistake, a failure, or a sign of a bad pilot. It is the single most professional thing you can do when an approach isn’t working out. Airline crews do it. Military pilots do it. The best stick-and-rudder pilots do it without ego or hesitation, because they decided long ago that they’d rather go around a hundred times too early than one time too late.

The go-around is one of those rare places where the safe choice and the cheap choice are the same choice. So next time you’re on final and something in your gut says no, listen to it: power up, climb out, and go around.

Key Takeaways

• Fly every approach as a go-around you might convert into a landing - not a landing with a go-around as backup.
• The decision is harder than the mechanics. Full power, pitch for climb, retract flaps in stages, and fly the pattern is teachable in an afternoon; owning the decision is the real skill.
• Use a stabilized-approach gate (around 500 feet AGL for light singles). If you’re not on path, on speed, configured, and in trim - and can’t fix it with a small correction - go around.
• Never dump all flaps at once down low. Retract in stages after establishing a positive climb; on retractable gear, confirm a positive rate before selecting gear up.
• On a checkride, delay is the biggest killer. A prompt, self-initiated go-around on a bad approach demonstrates exactly the judgment examiners want to see.