[Rant Alert!]
I just watched a YouTube video of a Boeing 747 go-around at Manchester. The video was shot by a spotter on the ground. The approach appears normal, then suddenly the jet pitches up and a go-around is initiated. No problem. I'm sure there's a reason for it. The 747 roars by, the gear returns to the wells, and the crew announces a go-around to the tower. The tower gives the crew go-around instructions. So far, so good.
The airplane couldn't have been more than seven hundred feet above the ground when the tower asks, "Handle 123, could you advise the reason for the go-around please?" The reason?! None of your business, that's the reason! We're talking about a Boeing 747 here. These guys were seven hundred feet above the ground, beginning a turn to a heading, climbing, re-configuring the airplane, running checklists, and making an announcement to the cabin. They don't have time to be justifying their go-around to some guy in the tower. They're a professional flight crew. They spend hundreds of hours in simulators practicing these scenarios. They can go around anytime they darn well feel like, including when their gut tells them to. They're in charge of the safety and operation of their ship, not the guy in the tower. He tells them when the runway is free of obstructions so they can land on it if they so choose.
Go-arounds are high workload operations. The airplane is low, slow, and draggy, and its vertical direction must be reversed quickly while being re-configured for climb. Then follows the chores of initial navigation and communication (notice the communication piece is last). A go-around is no time for an air traffic controller (ATC) to be asking a pilot what happened. It's none of his concern. All he needs to know is that the airplane is going around and whether or not the crew intends to return for another landing attempt. If he's curious, and I don't blame him if he is, he must exercise radio discipline and keep his questions to himself and perhaps the other controllers in the tower cab. Sometimes they don't get to know. That's part of their job, and they need to cope with that. Radio communications are strictly about business, so anything a controller (or pilot) communicates should be for a good and useful reason. Being curious about what happened is not a good or useful reason.
Luckily, the crew refused to provide a reason for the go-around initially. The Tower handed the flight off to Departure Control, and the new controller immediately asked the crew the reason for the go-around. The crew again did not respond and instead verified the heading they needed to fly (gee, that might be more important than discussing the reason for something that happened in the past). The controller verified the heading and again asked the crew about the go-around. The crew finally caved and advised the go-around was executed due to the illumination of a "Gear Unsafe" warning light on short final. They troubleshot for a bit then came back in and landed uneventfully.
Now, perhaps air traffic controllers in the United Kingdom are trained to inquire about the reason for a go-around so they can determine whether or not a situation on the ground was the cause. For instance, wildlife or debris on the runway or loss of ILS signal reception. Those are things the folks on the ground can fix so that the runway stays safe for future operations. I certainly see the value in that. However, any pilot in the world would undoubtedly notify ATC without prompting if a go-around was caused by an obstruction on the runway or ground equipment. After all, a pilot who goes around will most likely wish to come back and try another approach to the same runway, and most of us are smart enough to know that the luggage we saw scattered across the approach end during the first attempt probably didn't remove itself from the runway. And if there was some sort of onboard equipment failure or need to declare an emergency, the pilot understands that its his duty to inform ATC of this and will do so without prompting.
But if these controllers must ask, they should at least be trained to wait a minimum of three minutes after the go-around is initiated to give the crew time to complete critical tasks and climb to a safe altitude. Controllers need to understand that pilots have much more important things to tend to during go-arounds than talking on the radio. The radio is a controller's entire world, and I think sometimes they forget it's not the same for pilots. Not even remotely. In fact, pilots at all certification levels are universally taught to always "communicate" last. That means communicating with ATC is one of our lowest priorities. Non-pilot controllers (which represent the vast majority of the controller workforce) must understand some of these basic principles by which pilots operate so that they can provide better service. For a controller, many times that means being quiet and waiting for the crew to let them know what type of assistance, if any, they need from him. It may be a few minutes -- they've got other things to worry about first like keeping the airplane under control and safely away from terrain (i.e. during a go-around).
As I've mentioned before, I believe a good controller knows the boundaries of his role and stays inside them at all times, even if that means tolerating a few minutes (or more) of ambiguity. Pilots deal with this all the time when controllers issue unexpected instructions in the form of course or altitude changes. We're not allowed to ask the reason for the instruction, we're required to comply immediately and stay quiet. That's critical to the operation of the ATC system. If every pilot queried a controller after a new instruction was received, frequencies would be so congested they'd be useless and the skies would be disorderly and chaotic. Sometimes we don't get to know. What we do always know, though, is that controllers are skilled professionals and anything they do is for a reason, so when they give us a re-route we execute it immediately instead of asking them to justify the new instruction. Controllers need to do the same for pilots. When a pilot makes a professional decision, controllers must assume it's for a good reason and give the pilot space to do what he needs to do. In the case of the above-mentioned go-around, that would mean the controller would acknowledge receipt of the crew's transmission announcing the go-around, providing them go-around instructions (for instance, heading and altitude assignments), and remain silent while the crew handles the situation. Asking the crew for non-essential information during the early stages of the go-around requires them to divert their attention away from a low altitude, high workload maneuver (the riskiest combination) for no good reason.
I'm sure this post sounds biased on the pilot's side. It's not. I love air traffic controllers. I was just hired as an air traffic controller. Many controllers are outstanding at what they do. But some of them make fundamental mistakes and forget what their job is really about: providing service to pilots. Without pilots, there'd be no controllers. Yet without controllers, there'd still be pilots (that's how the early days of aviation were). There's a saying I've always loved that reveals a basic truth about the difference in roles of pilots and controllers, "Pilot screws up, pilot dies. Controller screws up, pilot dies."
That concludes my rant. I'll go-around from this post and make an effort to be more positive on my next one. Thanks for coming along.
