by Glenn Daly

"We were descending in a normal approach and, suddenly, the whole plane just kind of sat down - the pilot started to accelerate again and did some minor changes, first going one way, then another, then another. It was probably a minute or two past the airport that he announced that we had aborted the landing, and the reason for it was that there was another plane on the runway, and quite a large one. If he hadn't have been a professional, we probably would have been in a lot more trouble."

George Schiefer laughed when he said those last words. Schiefer, a city planner in Mill Valley, and his wife, a nervous flier, were passengers on United Airlines Flight 263 when it executed a missed approach - a regular occurrence on the one runway at Lindbergh Field. When it happened, at 9:16 a.m. on December 23, 1994, the ceiling was 7,000 feet, the visibility 15 miles. For that entire day, with a ceiling of no lower than 5,500 feet and visibility never less than 7 miles (and as much as 25), there were eight missed approaches logged.

David Sugarman, a Sales & Marketing V.P. in Mill Valley and a self-described frequent flier, was also aboard UAL 263 that Friday morning.

"It seemed like it was a normal approach. We were getting pretty close to the ground, I think we were just before that parking structure at the end of Laurel Street, and very suddenly and abruptly the pilot just aborted the landing. It wasn't a very hectic maneuver; it seemed like the plane responded right away and immediately began climbing. But what struck me about it was the pilot's voice. You could tell that he was upset because he had said, `They were about to put us down on another plane, a very large plane, so we decided to go around.'

"Immediately when we started climbing, the pilot banked to the right, and you could see that we were over the runway. And then he banked to the left and then he went around. By then we were climbing pretty handsomely, I mean he gunned it pretty hard. Boy, the pilot was sure pissed off about it when he got on that intercom. My take on it was that he was upset with air traffic control - he felt like they had put him in a position of danger.

"The pilot reacted quickly and professionally and did a very good job of getting us out of the way; and I was also fairly impressed with the plane - it's an awfully big plane, and for it to very suddenly end its decent and immediately begin climbing says something about the way they designed the thing. But I do feel that if the air traffic controller did waive off our landing approach, he did so at the last minute."

Tom Kamman, FAA Air Traffic Manager at Lindbergh Field, says the periodic go arounds are no big deal. "I'm sure that it was of no concern to the pilot. It's disconcerting for the passengers. The missed approach in itself is disconcerting because it's an unexpected, sudden application of power and then you look out ... and you see that off to your right is an airplane just departing, and depending upon your perspective, those aircraft look very close, because they are closer than normal."

Pam Berger, the FAA tower supervisor on duty at the time, says the local controller handling the operation had issued the take off clearance to Delta Flight 228, a wide-body Lockheed L1011, but that the aircraft was slow to get off the ground. When the controller realized that there was a potential conflict, UAL 263, a Boeing 757, was told to execute a missed approach. According to Berger, at no time was the safety of either aircraft compromised. Asked to make an educated guess at the number of such missed approaches at Lindbergh Field, Berger says there were less than double digits, daily.

The day before, there were 18 missed approaches, and while there were scattered light rain showers reported, never was the ceiling lower than 7,000 feet, nor the visibility less than 7 miles. On December 19, there were 10 missed approaches; on December 1, there were 15; but on both of those days weather was a factor: partially obscured sky, low ceilings and visibility, and on a few occasions, conditions that were below airport minima. For the rest of the month, the number of missed approaches was substantially less, averaging about 1 per day.

Consensus among pilots is that missed approaches (or go-arounds, as they prefer to call them) are inherently safe maneuvers and are regularly practised - they happen all the time, at all airports.

Countering that opinion is Simon Wright, a commercial pilot from Scotland. "The goal should be NO go-arounds - in the airline environment, they generally only occur when either the controller or the pilot is a bit over-ambitious. I know there are other circumstances ... .

"I fly to busy regional airports around Europe, including major hubs. In five years, I have only had to go around four times for traffic that was slow departing or clearing the runway, and five times for weather - crosswinds gusting out of limits or nasty snow-showers on visual approaches. I realise that the USA works to tighter tolerances with regards to spacing, and perhaps the problem is unavoidable whilst that is the case.

"Personally," continues Wright, "I think go-arounds are an extremely bad advertisement to an already nervous flying public, and should be avoided at all costs - consistent with safety, of course - preferably by getting the spacing-timing-speed right all around."

But the FAA's Kamman says there aren't many options at Lindbergh: "For example, if we had two runways that were parallel, we would land on one and take off on the other and then we would not run into this particular situation, except in very unusual circumstances.

"I would have been concerned if the controller had, in fact, not issued the missed approach," says Kamman, with regard to the missed approach in question. "There's a couple of problems, and it's all a matter of timing. We clear a jumbo jet, like the L1011, for take off and, historically, depending on its load factor, the initiation of its take off roll is a little slower than some other aircraft would be - it just takes it longer to accelerate. And the rule is that we cannot allow an arriving aircraft to cross the landing threshold unless the departing aircraft is 6000 feet down the runway and airborne. Our norm, if they're close, is to assign the missed approach aircraft a left turn to a heading of 250, which takes him south of the path of the departing airplane.

"If the departing aircraft had not started its take off roll, the take off clearance would have been canceled and the aircraft would have been told to pull off the runway. Normally, we try not to delay the arriving aircraft," continues Kamman. But if there are aircraft on the north side of the runway, and a line of aircraft waiting to depart on the south side, the arrival is, of necessity, forced to go around. Kamman insists, however, that Lindbergh Field has an outstanding safety record.

While FAA keeps track of missed approaches at some airports, their monthly summaries do not include them. And, because many requests of the FAA require processing through the Freedom of Information Act, figures on missed approaches at airports with comparable traffic counts are difficult to come by. Regardless, in the most current, available, list of traffic for FAA-Operated Airport Traffic Control Towers (Oct 92 - Sep 93) Lindbergh Field ranked 77th (of 402), with 209,000 operations. Significantly, it is the only major US airport with one runway - most have at least two parallel runways so that take offs and landings can be conducted simultaneously. LAX has four virtually parallel runways. SFO has two sets of parallel runways. Tucson, with 229,000 operations, has two parallel runways, each over 10,000 feet long.

Lindbergh's only runway, 9-27, has other problems. When landing from the east (which occurs 95% of the time), aircraft must descend at an angle that is 16% steeper than worldwide standards, because of high terrain to the east - a fact which precludes establishing a precision ILS (Instrument Landing System) approach and forces the use of a non-precision, Localizer approach, instead. This has caused the FAA to establish descent minima that are considerably above any other airport in the region, thus limiting the usefulness of the runway in low ceilings and low visibility - frequent occurrences in the winter. Which means that, if the weather is truly lousy, there are no landing alternatives besides sending Lindbergh bound aircraft to more capable airports like LAX, Phoenix or Ontario.

According to a study published in Logistics and Transportation Review, v. 28, March, 1992, by Earl F. Weener and Peter B. Wheeler of the Boeing Commercial Airplane Group: "Approach and landing is the most critical phase of flight. It accounts for more than half of worldwide jet transport airplane accidents. It makes good sense, therefore, to apply strong accident prevention resources to this area." Named first among the suggestions available with current technology was: " Every runway used by commercial transports should be equipped with an instrument landing system (ILS). ILS provides glide slope information through viusal cues on a primary cockpit instrument. It also provides the vital glide slope information needed by the ground proximity warnig and automatic approach systems."

But even approaching Lindbergh over Pt. Loma, from the ocean, where there is a full ILS for Runway 9, the descent cannot be made if visibility is less than 1 mile and the ceiling below 350 feet. There are airports (LAX and SFO among them) with Category II and III ILS approaches which allow properly equipped aircraft with trained personnel to descend to lower than 100 feet, with visibilities of less than 1/4 mile. Coupled with airport regulations that restrict take offs to between 11:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m., is it any wonder that airlines find it difficult to schedule long haul flights into San Diego?

Are there solutions? Perhaps the city or county or Port Authority could conduct another survey - since 1958 there have been forty studies sponsored by various groups with differing agendas. TwinPorts is dead, and support has dissipated for conversion of Miramar NAS, if or when the military ever leaves. Given Lindbergh Field's location and increasing usage, and San Diego's resurgent growth, the only solution appears to be to keep sending them around.

copyright 1995 Stephen Glenn Daly All Rights Reserved