With airlines, airports and other parts of the industry still recovering from the effects of the COVID pandemic, it’s instructive to look at how that two-year hiatus from “business as usual” has impacted their ability to respond effectively to emergencies and crises.
Many of the changes which have occurred over the last four years were already visible before the crisis started - or would have happened anyway. But these changes were accelerated dramatically by the sudden industry contraction sparked by the pandemic, which also forced airlines to neglect crisis planning, training and exercises while they focused on staying in business.
Firstly, tens of thousands of employees and contractors were furloughed, across the industry. Many were experienced professionals in the later stages of their careers, who decided either to take early retirement or to seek opportunities elsewhere. They included people who had worked in emergency response for years, or who had gained hands-on experience as members of their airline’s family assistance teams or other functions involved after incidents and accidents.
Similarly, many younger employees and contractors – particularly in “front line” airport operations – also lost their jobs. The results were seen when a shortage of qualified, security-screened staff both above and below the wing caused system-wide bottlenecks when travel demand surged post-COVID.
But these same front-line staff are the people airlines rely on to respond to emergencies (and service disruptions) on the ground. Even the largest and best-resourced carriers had become increasingly reliant on ground handlers before the pandemic, but the trend towards downsizing and outsourcing airport operations has accelerated as airlines rebuild post-COVID.
This has left most carriers almost totally reliant on their ground handlers in emergencies, or on notional support from alliance or code-share partners – assuming of course that the partner concerned has staff or resources available to deploy at the incident location. In reality, the front-line “responders” on duty on any given day may comprise a handful of relatively inexperienced ground handlers, who may not have been employed long enough to receive emergency response training and with no personal response experience.
Another trend which accelerated during COVID was a step-change in communication technology, which allowed companies to conduct meetings – and training sessions – online. This in turn facilitated working from home, which has created a post-pandemic expectation that flexible working should be a standard feature of the workplace, particularly among younger employees. The result has been that while virtual meeting platforms and other online tools allow the crisis management team to be activated and share information very quickly in an emergency, key personnel may be dispersed across multiple locations, which can make co-ordination and staff deployments more complex as the response develops.
In sum, the changes wrought by the pandemic have left airlines (and other businesses) facing the same spectrum of risks which existed before COVID, but with fewer resources, less in-house response experience and with ever-increasing expectations of how companies should behave in times of crisis. All of which means the aviation community has become more reliant than ever on experienced service providers like GoCrisis, with actual response experience and global resources which can be deployed quickly in an emergency.
John Bailey
Chief Operating Officer
