You have "landed" on what may be the most important pages of CJP’s Safety and Education Foundation web site, our Safe to Land℠ section. Here we address the ways to mitigate the most likely accident or incident that Citation owner/pilots are confronted with… the runway excursion. These pages are a product of a major CJP initiative that began in 2021 to improve our training and SOPs to mitigate these costly events. In the past decade, runway excursions have accounted for nearly 50% of our accidents and incidents, often the result of unstable approaches, effects of unexpected weather conditions or incorrect landing performance data.

Through a dedicated CJP study provided by the Presage Group, we have created new SOPs for the approach and landing phase that address shortcomings in the traditional “stabilized approach criteria.” To date the traditional rules have failed to curtail these accidents. In fact, unstable approaches under those traditional criteria result in a go around only 3% of the time… Why so seldom? As pilots we know when we aren’t meeting the “goals” of a stable approach (airspeed, glidepath, configuration, etc.), but we also judge in many cases that we have time to correct out-of-tolerance parameters and avoid going around needlessly….which works for us “most of the time!” Obviously we don’t intend to run off a runway when we set up an approach, but it happens all too often.

The Safe to Land℠ initiative breaks the paradigm by adding a “yellow zone,” a period of time beyond the traditional 1,000 and 500 ft stable approach gates, where we provide that time to “fix it,” while committing to a new “limit” point beyond which we commit to go around. This concept of green-yellow-red zones on approach and during landing is the way our brains work naturally… “I know I have an issue, I’m fixing it, but I have a bail out point that I’m committed to.” Using these new SOPs, none of us should find ourselves wishing we’d gone around when we didn’t….or going around when we didn’t need to…. Enjoy the results of the CJP Safe to Land℠ initiative… and Fly Safe!