Help! Can anyone fly a plane???

What started life as a joke from the movie ‘Airplane!’ created some great insights into management behaviours in a crisis.

For those who've never seen the aviation comedy classic ‘Airplane!’, there’s a scene where, faced with improbably incapacitated pilots at 40,000 feet, the flight attendant keys the microphone and 'gentilely' asks the passengers if any of them can fly a plane. Cue comedic panic…

A mate of mine used to be a simulator instructor on the Airbus A320 – the holiday wagon that carts you off on your annual pilgrimage to Berlin/Nice/Barcelona (delete as appropriate). When he wasn’t training real pilots in the simulator, he used to do corporate days so that execs could experience what it was like to fly an airliner. Nothing too dramatic; just a bit of stick, rudder and throttles, so that the execs could awe their children with tales of airborne derring-do over supper.

One day my mate decided to spice it up a bit. Faking a stomach cramp, he excused himself from the simulator cockpit ‘for a moment’, leaving the two execs in the pilot seats. As he left the flight deck, he handed the execs a folded piece of paper. Inside it read ‘The pilots have been incapacitated. It’s up to you to land the plane.’

Anyone who has ever been in a simulator will tell you it can be quite an immersive experience; very easy to forget that you’re actually only ten feet off the ground and that the ‘turbulence’ is just a set of hydraulic pistons dancing to software. I won’t tell you just yet what happened next, but suffice it to say, the experiment was very revealing, so my mate decided to repeat it with the other six execs on that management away day. A pair at a time, they were introduced to the cockpit and the basics of flying for ten minutes, and then stomach cramp, note, land (or maybe not).

So, of the four flights, how many do you suppose made it back alive? None? Well, no actually; three.

One of the flights crashed-and-burned in true Top Gun style. Two flights made it back but landed quite heavily. The passengers would have got out alive, but the insurer would have had a quiet heart attack with his morning glass of port. The other flight landed nice and smoothly; a ‘greaser’ as we say in aviation.

The normal practice is to do a bit of a debrief after a simulator session. The flight that had crashed-and-burned was crewed by the team's boss and a relatively junior member of staff. What transpired in the cockpit was very revealing in terms of a senior management reaction to an emergency: The boss seized the controls in true Charlton Heston style (everything short of ripping off his shirt apparently) and started giving his ‘co-pilot’ orders: “Be ready to do what I tell you, when I tell you”, etc; classic command-and-control behaviours.  The net result was that they didn’t gather any information, engage in any analysis, undertake any problem-solving, consider any options or therefore take any decisions. The boss’s entire bandwidth was consumed with handling the aircraft, which he did, er… not very well, right up to the moment they crashed. His junior/co-pilot did nothing, having been told to just ‘stand by and be ready’ - presumably for a fatal accident.

By contrast, the ‘greaser’ crew reacted very differently. The first thing they figured out was which one of them was going to handle the controls: which of them had the hand-eye coordination and presence of mind to take on the flying task, enabling the other one to lead on the other aspects; the data-gathering, the analysis, the options, the decisions. Then they worked it through, with the handling pilot still having enough bandwidth (over-and-above the flying task) to act as a sounding board for their colleague. Management hierarchy was set aside: They each drew on their strengths and worked together to solve the problem and find a way out of the predicament.

They also had an idea that no-one else had: They radioed air traffic control. Aircraft simulators simulate all aspects, including air traffic control. So they thought to call for help and received immediate guidance over the radio from a qualified, experienced A320 pilot. Instead of being exclusively inwardly-focused, they remained composed enough to reach outside of their immediate world to find solutions. The A320 pilot at ATC knew what to do and they executed on his advice really well. The result? A smooth landing, and happy passengers. Nobody died – not even the insurer.

So, the moral(s) of the tale? In a crisis…

1. The outcome of a crisis is not a foregone conclusion. How you react makes all the difference.
2. Set aside the normal hierarchy and make very sure that everyone plays to their strengths, remembering that their strengths in a crisis can be very different to their normal BAU abilities.
3. Usually, there is something quite obvious and very effective that can be done – and it’s only panic and unfamiliarity that are preventing you from seeing it.
4. Collaborating on the problem is a not only a very good way to ensure the best outcome: It also focuses minds on working the problem, which in turn avoids that unnecessary, unhelpful panic.
5. The fact that you’ve never done it before doesn’t mean that you can’t. Crises are a great educator in terms of what you're really capable of.
6. Calling for help isn’t an admission of failure: It’s your best ledge against becoming so inwardly focused that you fail to see how the wider world really can help you solve the problem, and might even make you surprisingly successful - in spite of the dire situation.

…and finally, if you’re in the poo, leave your inner Charlton Heston at home.

Dedicated to Andrew Bartlett, someone who taught me a tremendous amount about leadership and management by his own example, and absolutely the one you'd want on the flight deck with you. RIP Andrew.