UC Berkeley

Go-around is an aborted landing of an aircraft that is on final approach. In this work, we model the impact of separation, airport condition, weather condition, and trajectory performance on go-around occurrence. A trajectory-based go-around detection algorithm has been developed and applied to the last three-quarter of JFK arrival flights in 2018. Principal component regression (PCR) model, with a retrospective causal inference design, has been estimated and further been used in counterfactual scenarios to reveal the causal correlations between factors of interest and go-around occurrence. Our results suggest that airport ceiling and aircraft speed control are the two most salient factors in causing go-arounds.