I fly for a large airline that has been evolving its stable approach policy and training over the years, to the point where an unstable approach that continues to a landing is an extremely rare event, trending towards zero. How did we get here, considering where we started from: almost no policy at all and a significant proportion of approaches that would be categorised as unstable under today’s rules?
Some of the crucial factors I would list as:
* A well-resourced FOQA setup with non-jeopardy bidirectional feedback
* Simplifying the stable approach criteria so that they could be more easily applied in a high workload situation
* Continuously highlighting and praising examples of discontinued approaches
* Dedicated training modules exploring the effects of environmental conditions and airframe configurations on landing safety
* Instilling a culture where a go-around when in doubt is seen as positive and professional
* Sim practice for rejected landings
There’s obviously a lot more to it, it’s taken a quarter of a century to get there and the job’s not finished yet. I understand there was a defining moment in Flt Ops some time ago where it was realised that it was a matter of *when*, not *if* we were going to have a runway excursion and/or hull loss.
To give some idea, when I joined and was being trained on the 737, I remember being encouraged to land half way down a 4,000m runway because we were vacating at the far end. The only constraint on landings was that it was frowned upon to do glide approaches to touchdown - power up at 100R was fine! Stopping distance was almost never calculated, just “eyeballed” and woe betide you if you touched the Lever of Shame (speedbrake). Funny/scary looking back, especially given the kind of hangovers you were normally sporting...