Just backing up what loginfail has to say about announcements. They are extremely tightly scripted in order that there can be no ambiguity by either crew or passengers about what is being said. Most people might not have given it consideration, but airline crews rarely fly with the same pilot and cabin brew colleagues from one flight to the next. At my airline there are approximately 4000 pilots and 14000 cabin crew, and each and every one of us is examined on a yearly basis to ensure we know the correct terms and phrases for everything from speaking to Air Traffic Control to the words to use when opening an emergency exit. The exact words are Very Important and a cockpit voice recorder (and these days, any passenger video footage!) will be scrutinised to the nth degree in the case of any incident. If we are all using the exact same phrases then it doesn’t matter if we are with an entirely new set of crew that we have never met before, we still all do and say the same things. If someone went ‘off piste’ with announcements, it would alert the other crew to the fact that that crew member might not be either competent or coping with the situation. In fact, pilots are taught that a non-standard reply (or worse, no reply at all) to a question that requires a standard reply should be treated with suspicion and your colleague monitored to make sure they are doing everything else correctly. This is particularly important - a lack of response could indicate a sick pilot, for example which could be a problem at certain critical points. One of my favourite (if it’s possible to have a favourite part!) of the regular simulator training we receive is the exercise where the other pilot has to pretend to die part way through a landing in difficult conditions, and the usual clue for this happening is that they don’t respond to a question. If that happened for real, internally I would probably poo my pants, but the training I’ve had would be so ingrained that I would be able to do it all.
WRT aborted landings, flight and cabin crew call them go arounds. They are not common manoeuvres, but they are also not considered emergency manoeuvres. We practice these regularly in the simulator, for a variety of reasons and under a range of conditions. A go around could be carried out for any number of things -the most common reasons are when the aircraft ahead of you doesn’t get off the runway quickly enough (which is not uncommon at busier airports where the planes land one after another after another) the next most common reason probably a crosswind or tailwind being outside of the aircraft or pilot’s landing capability, or fog or cloud obscuring the pilot’s view of the runway. The thing to remember about go arounds is that the pilots will be evaluating the situation all the way through the approach, and while a go around may feel like a sudden manoeuvre to a passenger, the pilot will have been aware of the aircraft ahead, or the wind direction, or the thickness of the fog all the way down and the possibility of a go around kept at the front of their thoughts so that if they do have to do one, it will be a planned and controlled situation.
While many of the situations that have been described on this thread seem to be extreme and scary, to the crew on the day it will probably not have been. I’ve had various situations that have been surprising but we get training on controlling our startle reflex, and get on with the job. In fact, if it is possible to train an airline crew to deal with it, they have probably had the training. And if it is outside of the regular training we get, we also get given training modules on how to deal with events we have not trained specifically for. We are trained regularly and often - airline crew training is considered to be so tight that the medical profession has in recent years looked to aviation to see what they can learn from it.