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A friend mentioned being a passenger during a commercial aircraft landing at Taiwan's Penghu Airport (MZG, RCQC) where they had almost touched down but had to abort and keep going due to sudden wind event causing "scary motion". They circled back around and landed minutes later uneventfully.

I'm sure there are standard aviation terms for these but I don't know them.

I mentioned that these happen somewhat regularly especially at certain airports and that one of the first thing student pilots learn is how to do touch-and-go's.

Now I'm curious if there are rough numbers for how often this happens per year and if airports like Penghu's see these more frequently? Something like one out of every 100 days an aircraft has to come around and try again at that airport, or one landing out of 10,000 or similar type of summary statistic.

Pondlife
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uhoh
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  • Help with tags is welcome, as are any edits to improve on my lack of the proper aviation vocabulary. – uhoh Oct 27 '20 at 15:43
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    Related: How common are cancelled landing attempts? – Bianfable Oct 27 '20 at 15:52
  • @Bianfable Thanks! There's a lot there about Heathrow and that is already useful to me. But I'm hoping for something more specific to MZG if possible. – uhoh Oct 27 '20 at 15:55
  • YouTube: Magong Airport in Penghu recognized as challenging place to land – uhoh Oct 27 '20 at 16:00
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    I can't find anything particular about Penghu, but the FAA has published some numbers in this PDF on page 12: "average go-arounds across all Core 30 airports were 0.3 percent". – Bianfable Oct 27 '20 at 16:05
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    0.3% doesn't seem like much until you realize that 0.3% of 11 million flights is 33,000 go-arounds (at the 30 busiest airports only) which is 90 per day, or 3 per day per airport, on average. So, about 1 every 8 hours at the 30 largest US airports. – FreeMan Oct 29 '20 at 17:59
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    Hey, @Bianfable, between you & me, I think we've got an answer (well, sorta...). You did the hard digging, I just did some math - feel free to write it up and you'll get my vote. – FreeMan Oct 29 '20 at 18:00
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    @FreeMan Yes, we have the general numbers, but I have nothing specific on Penghu. Without that this is just a duplicate of How often do commercial flights go-around?, ironically your question from 5 years ago. The answer there also says "1–3 per 1000 approaches", which agrees with the FAA number I found. – Bianfable Oct 29 '20 at 18:12
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    Ha! thought that sounded familiar... ;) – FreeMan Oct 29 '20 at 18:13
  • @Bianfable The general numbers are already helpful to me and I appreciate all of the effort. Penghu might be especially challenging for statistics because it seems to be domestic-only flights, is almost completely dependent on tourist traffic, sits in the center of an "interesting region" and where the culture isn't particularly enthusiastic about explicitly quantifying things associated with bad luck or danger. Thus this may not turn out to be answerable quantitatively due to lack of authoritative sources. – uhoh Oct 29 '20 at 23:46

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