Classification and Analysis of Go-Arounds in Commercial Aviation Using ADS-B Data

Go-arounds are a necessary aspect of commercial aviation and are conducted after a landing attempt has been aborted. It is necessary to conduct go-arounds in the safest possible manner, as go-arounds are the most safety-critical of operations. Recently, the increased availability of data, such as ADS-B, has provided the opportunity to leverage machine learning and data analytics techniques to assess aviation safety events. This paper presents a framework to detect go-around flights, identify relevant features, and utilize unsupervised clustering algorithms to categorize go-around flights, with the objective of gaining insight into aspects of typical, nominal go-arounds and factors that contribute to potentially abnormal or anomalous go-arounds. Approaches into San Francisco International Airport in 2019 were examined. A total of 890 flights that conducted a single go-around were identified by assessing an aircraft’s vertical rate, altitude, and cumulative ground track distance states during approach. For each flight, 61 features relevant to go-around incidents were identified. The HDBSCAN clustering algorithm was leveraged to identify nominal go-arounds, anomalous go-arounds, and a third cluster of flights that conducted a go-around significantly later than other go-around trajectories. Results indicate that the go-arounds detected as being anomalous tended to have higher energy states and deviations from standard procedures when compared to the nominal go-arounds during the first approach, prior to the go-around. Further, an extensive comparison of energy states between nominal flights, anomalous flights, the first approach prior to the go-around, and the second approach following the go-around is presented.