LIFE AT THE EDGE OF A SMOKING HOLE

Richard S. Levick, Esq. - 19 Dec. 2006

Crash management has been around since the birth of flight. In fact, the Wright brothers nearly crashed their plane at Kitty Hawk in December 1903 while landing as a gust of wind tumbled it end over end. Damage was extensive, yet their historic low-altitude flights have achieved near-mythic status.

Orville and Wilbur were actually masters of crisis communications as a best practice of crash management. In 1908 Orville piloted the flight in which the first powered-aircraft fatality occurred; his passenger, Thomas Selfridge, was killed. When Wilbur told the Washington Post that his “first thought” was for the “safety of passengers,” he was following the primal rule of airplane crisis communications: first and foremost, acknowledge human loss.

After more than a century of experience with aviation accidents, airline disaster communications has matured into a science.

As memory-searing images of a smoking hole are beamed into living rooms worldwide, an air disaster can jeopardize a commercial airline’s financial status, threaten its perceived reliability, and resonate throughout the airline industry.  Even the crash of a prop plane can touch the lives of thousands – business and leisure travelers, pilots, airport and airline officials, maintenance crews, union officials, airline stakeholders, not to mention evolving government policy.

Crisis Craves Order

Good communications managers bring a sense of order, competency, and control to the crash site and its gruesome scenes. Effective crash management provides solace to victims’ families and reassurances to the public at large, essentially limiting the damage to the crash site and preventing further harm to the airline itself.

In an airline disaster, good crisis management always includes a coherent, carefully planned strategy for delivering information, even if it is the painful news that a loved one is dead. But since airplane crashes vary widely (in location, cause, consequence, etc.), it’s impossible to craft a communications strategy that works for every incident.

Still, there are certain elements of a well-crafted crisis communications strategy that do not change. Ideally, airline crash communications should be viewed in three distinct phases: pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis. You can isolate the variables within each phase, but the entire management system is interdependent and integrated. Effective crisis managers see the whole picture, not just its parts.

Pre-crisis Playbook

The pre-crisis phase begins long before takeoff with a pre-established crisis communications "playbook” tested by an independent consultant with experience in airline safety and airline disasters. While every airline has a crisis communications plan, a good consultant ensures the plan’s soundness and that airline representatives are actually prepared to implement. A consultant might conduct drills and assessments, and make modifications to the crisis communications plan based on outcomes.

Crisis communicators should always be knowledgeable about aircraft design, the safety of airplanes – even the mechanics of flight.

Today’s commercial aircraft are engineered by Boeing and Airbus to emphasize safety and to minimize chances for failure. Good airline disaster crisis communicators follow suit, stressing aviation safety and the benefits of new and ever-developing safety equipment and technology.

Dealing from Strength

In many ways, aviation industry crisis communicators are dealing from strength in a way that the pharmaceutical and chemical industries are not. After all, flying is, in fact, relatively safe, and industry spokespersons use statistics to back that up.  With 10 million domestic flights in the U.S. each year, few mishaps or accidents occur. The odds of being killed in a car crash (7.6 million to 1) are substantially higher than the odds of getting killed in a plane crash (52.6 million to 1). Each year, car crashes kill an estimated 1.2 million people worldwide and injure 40 times more, but there’s just one death for every 2 billion miles flown.

Good communicators can use such established facts to paint a picture that airplanes are safer than cars – and, in the art of communications, it is pictures, not mere words, that you somehow want to convey. Here’s one example: “Even though a plane may be subjected to storm turbulence powerful enough to shake the cabin and knock luggage around, passengers are still safer up in the clouds than down on the road in their Volvos.”

Also in the industry asset column, the public by and large already knows about this comparative safety ratio. In that sense, crisis communications is also about reinforcing existing perceptions.

In the liability column, many people do not know that 80% of aviation accidents are the result of human error or technical problems. Public doubts about pilot training can undermine everything an airline stands for.

Crisis Mode

The crisis phase begins with the crash itself. A plane is down. Perhaps hundreds are dead.

At that point, the airline is expected to provide answers to survivors and the family members of crash victims and cooperate with crash investigators. The list of agencies involved is an alphabet soup: the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), and TSA (Transportation Safety Administration).

As crash investigators comb still-smoldering wreckage for clues, the public’s imagination can get ahead of the investigation: Was it engine failure, faulty maintenance, pilot error, poor air traffic control, flight crew problems, a terribly flawed check-in process, terrorism? What new plot has Homeland Security uncovered? What can that little black box recorder possibly tell us about how passengers actually felt as the plane spiraled down?

Crews in hardhats recover the nose, wings, tail, instrument panels, and finally the black box recorder, which, from a communications standpoint, is an invaluable source of information for crash investigators because it can take the mystery out of a plane crash. If crisis craves order, it abhors uncertainty.

Yet even with the mystery solved, public confidence is often still shaken, and that lingering loss of trust defines the next level of challenge for the crisis communicator. Exacerbating the challenge is the fact that catastrophic risks, which kill many people at once in a single location, are more newsworthy than chronic risks, despite the fact that chronic disasters, being chronic, are actually greater threats to society.

Being human, the public also has a morbid fascination with the smoking hole, and the gruesome scenes of charred earth and death. It doesn’t help that plane crashes are high on everyone’s list of terrible ways to die.

The Must-do’s

Whatever their perception, people matter most in a crisis, and crisis communications plans should reflect that overriding priority.

There are three steps that crisis communicators must take well before arrival at the crash site.

First, acknowledge the human element. Sympathize, empathize, and eulogize. The first press statement should always be about concern for the families of the people injured or killed. No one wants to fly on a coldhearted airline.

Second, ensure the public about the cooperation of the airline with all investigative parties involved. As with every other business these days, accountability and transparency in policies and operations are decisive messages.

Finally, keep the media and all audiences informed promptly of each new fact unearthed. An emphatic willingness to communicate fosters a sense of dependability.

And, communicating a willingness to learn from the crisis at hand gives a sense that the tragedy was not an irredeemable event, but that it might actually contribute to lives being saved in the future, which further sends a most reassuring (and legitimate) message about the airline itself.

Which takes us to the final phase of airline crisis communications.

Post-crisis: An Assurance of Progress

The post-crisis phase begins when news coverage of the crash has slowed. It involves a reassessment of the existing crisis communications plan at a point in time when the airline is not in crisis mode.

Have all audiences been appropriately targeted in the plan – families of the injured or dead, the public, airline employees, the media, crash investigators, airline stakeholders, etc.? How should the communications strategy be tweaked in order to better reach these constituencies?

The post-crisis phase may also involve examining case studies of aviation disasters, including nightmare scenarios from other industries. Nightmares develop from two types of crisis responses – the clam and the ostrich.

The clam is a company that usually resorts to “no comment” when reporters call.  It believes unresponsiveness is best because what happens in a crisis situation is nobody’s business but the firm’s. And what can they do about it at that point anyway?

The ostrich may even be dumber than the clam as it sticks its proverbial head in the sand hoping nobody will notice. Unfortunately, the ostrich hides only 5% of its body, with 95% still in plain view. And you can imagine which part of the body is most conspicuous at that point!

The lesson for all communicators is that the public usually sees more of you than you think.

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Richard S. Levick, Esq., President & CEO of Levick Strategic Communications, protects brands and reputations during the highest-stakes global crises and litigation. Honored as Crisis Agency of the Year by the Holmes Report in 2005, the Firm wins the hearts and minds of key audiences with comprehensive campaigns on behalf of clients targeted by regulators, embroiled in litigation, or confronted by grassroots movements. He was recently named to the PRNews Hall of Fame for life time achievement. Find a comprehensive arsenal of vital communications tools at www.levick.com, including books, newsletters, and helpful articles.