Originally Posted by safetypee
A crew can elect to accept the increased risk but must be prepared to justify it if there were to be an incident.
The problem is not being able to justify your decision if something happens. The problem is that sometimes, as a captain, you might throw away the best and safest solution because you might need to justify yourself even if everything goes well. I refer to my approach in Rhodos in
my previous post.
Let's assume that I would have landed with a tower reported tailwind of 12 kts on this 3305m long rwy 25 (with ILS). There's no doubt in my mind that landing was the best and safest option. Still I elected to go around to come back for the VOR 07 approach. Sure, when needed, a go around is nothing dangerous, but going around unnecessarily, will scare the pax, submit the engines to an extra high temperature peak, burn 400 kg of reserve fuel, give extra workload to crew and atc and might delay other traffic. In the situation in Rhodos I described doing all this added nothing to safety! The contrary is true!
So then why did I go around? Well, I can imagine the twr controller writing a report that I landed with a 12 kts tailwind or a kid taping the conversations with twr, filming the landing and putting it on Youtube.
I regret that is has come to a point where decisions are not always being made in the best interest of safety, but just to make sure nobody can sue or fire you.