Helios Crash - Greece

At the recent ABTA convention in Marrakech, Paul Riches of Libra Holidays spoke of the effects the Helios Airways crash in Greece had on their organization. Both Libra Holidays and Helios are owned by the same parent company.

You may recall this was the incident where the plane appeared to lose its oxygen supply to the flight crew, leaving the plane to crash into mainland Greece after running out of fuel. Media reports speculated that a passenger had got onto the flight deck to try and take over the control.

Interestingly, pre 9/11 access to the flight deck was relatively easy, now in the days of armour plated doors locked from the inside it’s almost impossible to gain entry, a conundrum for safety experts going forward.

This incident had a huge effect on Helios Airways based in Cyprus, with relentless media attention on the airline, creating a great strain on the directors, management and staff of the organisation.

Libra were affected in the UK as Helios was part of their group but they did not experience the same pressures as the airline team,

Paul stated that the Helios Senior management were ‘emotionally scarred’ by the incident after dealing with the relatives and families of those killed and the media intrusion into their business on top of the shock of the whole incident itself

The pressure remains for quite some time in high profile incidents such as this. Companies have to be prepared for many weeks, months and even years of follow up. Families and staff need ongoing emotional and practical support, they want answers, there may be litigation, your brand is damaged and needs re-building, how your ‘aftercare’ works is also subject to media attention. How you deal with all this affects the public and media view of your organization. What do you do at the funerals, how do you mark anniversaries, what marks of respect do you pay to the families of those bereaved?

In the aftermath of the Kegworth crash, British Midland were still involved with  anniversary memorial services for the families some years after the incident occurred.

It pays to be prepared for these kinds of incident, all of this should be part of your crisis management plans and ensuring you have access to trained, specialist personnel to handle some of these issues is also paramount.

But whatever you do for your passengers, also remember your staff will need it to!  Those staff in the emergency services who dealt with the London bombings of 7/7 required emotional support following the horrific scenes they witnessed underground.  Providing this support gives them an opportunity to offload the things they saw, so they can get themselves back on track and avoid any absence from work due to the emotional stress or strain they may have experienced.

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Crisis Management for Schools

docleaf has moved into a new market for its crisis planning and response services. Working in conjunction with SFS a leading insurer to the independent schools sector, docleaf have put together a crisis management package similar to that offered to the travel and leisure industry.

The school pays for a crisis management audit, a full set of crisis management plans, a days training and access to our full range of response services. In return SFS insure the school to cover the additional costs of activation in a crisis, primarily the crisis mentoring, trauma support and call centre use. They have to retain docleaf in order to get insured, this ensures the quality of the response in the event of a serious incident

With increasingly adventurous school trips now taking place the scheme has been tremendously well received by the School Bursars. They are constantly worried about the effects a serious incident could have on a schools reputation if it is not handled well.

2 Schools have already signed up for the scheme which was only launched a few weeks ago, while a number of other top independent schools are also expressing interest.

Incidents involving children are always high profile in the media so being prepared for them gives a head start to any organisation irrespective of the sector they are in.

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Health & Safety ‘due diligence’ policies and procedures

Anyone operating within the confines of the package travel directive (or even those sitting on the edge) should start to get their safety management systems into place if they are not already there.

In this age of ever increasing litigation and the ‘compensation culture’ that prevails, those organisations without systems in place are the ones who cannot defend any legal claims against them.

Ian Hopkinson, Senior Partner at mb-law says “ As a firm who are constantly defending public liability claims against the travel industry you cannot underestimate the power of having due diligence information to assist with your defence.”   He goes on to say “Under the package travel regulations, travel arrangers are responsible for the negligent actions of their third party suppliers.  the death of a client or an employee on account of gross negligence can lead to a prison sentence. This may seem ridiculous but its actually the law. Consequently it pays to check your suppliers in every way to ensure they meet local standards. Get policies and procedures into place for auditing them, provide information and warnings to your customers and suppliers on health & safety. Ensure that safety issues are prioritised and that your customer service has a due diligence loop in place.”

for more information on mb-law see www.mb-law.co.uk

docleaf specialise in installing H&S systems into the travel and leisure industry, for further information contact info@docleaf.com

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We would like to wish all our e-news readers and docleaf clients a very merry Christmas and a safe and crisis free 2006.