New Campaign Aims to Shift Pilot Culture Around Go-Arounds as a Safety Decision

Flight instructor and pilot examiner Jim Pitman, who is also an airline pilot, has launched an initiative called Go-Arounds Are Awesome, aimed at encouraging pilots to view a go-around as a positive, sound aeronautical decision rather than a failed landing attempt. Pitman says the campaign addresses a well-documented hazard in general aviation: the tendency to continue an unstable approach, which he says can contribute to runway excursions, hard landings, and loss-of-control accidents.

Pitman argues that although pilots are trained to execute go-arounds, external pressures, goal-oriented thinking, and repeated successful outcomes from marginal approaches can make the safer choice feel unnecessarily difficult. "Pilots are wired to complete the mission," he said. "That mindset can make a go-around feel like a failure, even when it is the best course of action."

Drawing on his airline experience, where safety culture demands a stabilized approach and requires an automatic rejection of the approach if stabilization parameters are not met, Pitman designed the campaign to complement existing training with a cultural shift. The initiative encourages pilots, instructors, and flight schools to positively reinforce go-arounds and treat the decision to discontinue an approach as an example of sound judgment. Through the campaign's website, pilots and instructors are invited to learn about stabilized approaches and go-arounds, sign a Go-Around Pledge, and share the initiative with others.

This effort belongs to a broader recognition in general aviation that unstable-approach accidents are often behavioral rather than technical: pilots already know how to fly a go-around, but the decision to initiate one gets overridden by the desire to complete the flight as planned. Pitman's framing — that "training teaches pilots how to execute a go-around, but culture determines whether they will actually do it" — points to a gap that checklists and maneuver proficiency alone do not close.

Airline operations illustrate how a stabilized-approach culture can work in practice: rejecting an approach that misses stabilization parameters is treated as automatic and expected, removing the personal judgment call that can be swayed by pressure or past successes. General aviation, without that same structural mandate, relies more heavily on individual pilots weighing the decision in the moment, which is exactly the pressure point the campaign targets.

What happens next depends on adoption: how many pilots, instructors, and flight schools sign the Go-Around Pledge and whether instructors incorporate the campaign's positive framing into training and debriefs. Its effect on accident trends, if any, would only become visible over a longer stretch of flight activity than the campaign has yet had.