By Olivier Rouchard in Aviation — 16 Jun 2026

The Stabilized Approach: Set the Criteria, Not the Outcome

Decide what 'on track' looks like before the pressure hits — or abandon the approach. The pilot's rule for pre-committing to your standards.

A night airliner flight deck on short final approach, the lit runway approach lights and centerline visible ahead through the windscreen, the glowing primary flight and navigation displays on the panel, and the pilot flying from the right seat. Two torn-paper magazine-cutout ribbons in bold black stencil capitals overlay the dark upper frame: a top ribbon reading 'THE STABILIZED APPROACH' and a lower ribbon reading 'MEET THE CRITERIA OR GO AROUND.'

💭 By 1,000 feet above the runway, a pilot has already decided what would make them abort the approach — it's non-negotiable.

Aviation sets the criteria in advance

✈️ By 1,000 feet, the aircraft must be:

in landing configuration
on speed
on the correct path
with checklists complete.

Miss any one and you go around. It's a hard rule, verifiable on the flight data. The final approach is a high workload phase of the flight. Fixing a bad parameter low and fast causes most landing accidents.

You decide in the scramble

🎯 Most people make their biggest calls (a job, a house, a relationship) with no standard set in advance. They improvise the criteria in the rush, emotionally loaded, at peak pressure. That's a destabilized approach. The outcome feels chaotic because the decision was.

✅ So set your go/no-go before the pressure arrives, while you're still calm. Name what "stabilized" looks like for the decision:

the data is in hand
you're not rushed
you're emotionally clear
you've consulted the right people
your criteria are explicit, agreed in advance.

You can't guarantee the outcome. You can decide, ahead of time, exactly what would make you walk away. — 🔗 read more.

🚫 And if you're not stabilized, you go around. That's discipline, not hesitation. Abandoning a bad approach isn't failure, it's the entire skill. A stabilized approach lands smoothly; a destabilized one is a scramble you spend years cleaning up.

☝🏼 We fix the criteria early because fixing them at 200 feet is reckless. Your stakes feel smaller, so you improvise under pressure and call it instinct. Set the rule when you're calm instead: what are your "Stable Standards"? Let that version of you overrule the rushed one.

More from the series about Decision Making models: