HouseOfPAE

I took my son out to Gravelly Point to watch planes land on rwy 19 at DCA tonight around 1930. I've been doing this for years, but tonight we actually saw a missed approach. Looked like a UAL 737. I know missed approaches happen all the time, but I'm curious to hear from pilots what they think happened. Here's what I saw:

- aircraft was on the River Visual 19, made the final right turn after the 14th St Bridge, as soon as the aircraft completed the turn I could tell he turned too far right and not aligned with rwy 19, looked like he was lined up with taxiway Kilo. Then it appeared as though he immediately went missed approach once he cleared the inlet and climbed out, didn't even make an attempt to correct since he was so far right of the centerline (my speculation).

Winds at the time were 6 kts out of 190. We followed him back around the pattern and he made it just fine on the second attempt.

Just curious on what pilots experienced with the River Visual think happened here.

Thanks -- in any event it was interesting to see.

forgot to bid

I don't know what happened but as soon as they hit the go-around buttons it probably looked something like this:

elcid79

Thats really cool that you an your son go out and experience this. Some of my fondest memories with my father were looking at airplanes.

To answer your question, any number of things can cause a missed approach. A mistake such as the one you listed from an airliner is not likely. With that said, I was not there.

What generally causes missed approaches on nice weather days is loss of spacing between aircraft. So if an airplane takes too long to clear the runway, another aircraft decelerating faster than a trailing aircraft. or a trailing aircraft flying faster than the leading ac. etc, you get the idea.

Regardless of what caused this, missed approaches are a normal procedure in airliners, we train them, and practice them regularly.

FlyerJosh

I'll look for the USA Today article...

"Hundreds Fearful as Plane Narrowly Averts Catastrophe During Aborted Landing In Nation's Capital"

DirectTo

Haha. So sad. So true.

For those of you who get into DCA...how is the river visual on a fun/change-it-up scale? It's one of those airports I wish we got to go into.

MoonShot

Its a nice change of pace from the 10 mile ILS finals. On a dark night, in marginal weather, with any kind of west wind aloft, it will get your attention though.

Personally, I like flying the visual 22 into LGA better when you approach from the south and ATC takes you up the Hudson. The view from the FO's seat is spectacular. You don't have much time to sight see on the visual into DCA.

N9373M

I was lucky enough to land (and depart!) a 172 there in 1995. It was 800 ovc and we were cleared Irons3 arrival 2500 til OXONN ILS to 36. Once we broke out they had us circle to 33, and "minimum time through the intersection". I was able to turn into Signature before the intersection.

Kudos to the controllers, they were extremely professional and actually apologized for a box vector to let some fast movers in ahead of me.

The whole HDTA reservation thing was interesting (via touch tone phone). I kept forgetting to precede my tail number with the "N". FSS helped me out with that one.

That's one approach/departure I'll never forget.

captjns

Then what happened? Lost bags!!!!! Oh no!!!!!

N9373M

No, we did not lose our bags.

Happy Thanksgiving.

forgot to bid

You've got to love the DCA river visual 19 and LGA 31 visual,

ATC: "Got the river in sight?" or LGA "got the airport in sight?"

You: "Nope, it's raining and dark."

ATC: "Now?"

You: "Nope."

ATC: "Okay, cleared the visual."

You: "Okay."