Roads to Resilience

aspect at once. They can step back, keep an eye on the bigger picture, act as a sounding board for the duty commander and manage key external stakeholders on their behalf if needed. Further, it means that when the airline operations department declares an emergency, an experienced and well-prepared response team can take the incident away from them and manage it separately in the Crisis Centre. The event’s influence on normal operations is thereby minimised. Airlines encounter many unexpected events during operations, yet Virgin’s emergency response team is engaged infrequently. The reason is that many unexpected events, such as flight diversions for weather or medical reasons, occur so often that they are considered business as usual and are dealt with through standard operating procedures. Even when an aircraft declares an emergency, for example, due to problems with an aircraft’s undercarriage, most times the operations department can deal with it. In those instances the duty commander will be alerted and will be on standby, but generally response teams will only step in when an event: • can attract significant media attention • can lead to a large number of enquiries by passengers and staff • impacts multiple routes • has direct safety and security implications Even when events meet these criteria, many will be business as usual and can be dealt with through standard contingency plans. In the past airlines have had to deal with a range of security, terrorist, and weather related incidents and are therefore prepared to deal with the consequences. For instance, although Virgin Atlantic does not have specific plans for tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic ash, industrial action, or terrorist events such as 9/11: “ … what we do have is a contingency plan for airspace closure, for whatever reason. Further, we have a two-tier approach. We have an Amber Team that deals with very specific events and a Red Crisis Team that deals with major aircraft accidents. We have never had to activate our Red Team as such, but we do activate the Amber Team for a lot of events. When they are activated, we will go through a set of procedures in terms of accounting for staff, finding out where our aircraft are, making sure people are safe and secure, determining what we are going to say to passengers and the media, and what we need to do to get operations back to normal ” (Manager Resilience and Business Continuity). In those instances, executives are kept informed and are available to provide support but typically do not get involved: “ The commander who is running those situations is very competent. He knows where his decision matrix is and what his level of empowerment is, and he just gets on with it ” (Chief Operating Officer). As a result of this structure: “ When hurricane Sandy approached the US East Coast last year, we were able to launch aircraft up until a time where we thought the weather was going to hit operations. We were the last flight that got in and we were also the first flight to get out of there afterwards ” (Manager Resilience and Business Continuity). Monitoring the wider threat landscape Delivering a remarkable customer experience is core to the Virgin brand. However, safety and security always come first. Virgin’s approach goes well beyond statutory requirements – it is about peace of mind in every respect. This does not mean that the company’s attitude towards risk is about avoidance. It is about managing risk sensibly: “ We fly to some places with challenging

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Roads to Resilience: Building dynamic approaches to risk to achieve future success