7. How the story develops
• The media gets hold of it
• Mainstream and social
8. How the story develops
• The media gets hold of it
• Mainstream and social
• Speculation is standard
9. How the story develops
• The media gets hold of it
• Mainstream and social
• Speculation is standard
• Comment treated as fact
10. How the story develops
• The media gets hold of it
• Mainstream and social
• Speculation is standard
• Comment treated as fact
• “Expert commentators” (the usual suspects)
11. How the story develops
• The media gets hold of it
• Mainstream and social
• Speculation is standard
• Comment treated as fact
• “Expert commentators” (the usual suspects)
• Confusion reigns
12. How the story develops
• The media gets hold of it
• Mainstream and social
• Speculation is standard
• Comment treated as fact
• “Expert commentators” (the usual suspects)
• Confusion reigns
• Human cost
13. How the story develops
• The media gets hold of it
• Mainstream and social
• Speculation is standard
• Comment treated as fact
• “Expert commentators” (the usual suspects)
• Confusion reigns
• Human cost
• Reputational cost
14. How the story develops
• The media gets hold of it
• Mainstream and social
• Speculation is standard
• Comment treated as fact
• “Expert commentators” (the usual suspects)
• Confusion reigns
• Human cost
• Reputational cost
• Filed in media databases – for the next time
21. 18th June, 2014, 6.00am
Reach: 5,300,000
•Older aircraft lack safety gear
•People die unnecessarily in post-crash fires
•FAA “cost-benefit” approach to safety
•Multi-million dollar lawsuits reveal damning evidence
•Just 15% of small-aircraft crashes are investigated
thoroughly.
22. 18th June 2014, 5.15pm
Reach: 43,200,000 people
“Unfit for Publication: How USA Today Got Everything Wrong”
• “Nearly every inference about aviation in the article is wrong.
• “The real story here is media bias and editorial malpractice, not the dangers of aviation or
manufacturing defects.
• “The writing in the USA Today article is so transparently biased that the author draws
conclusions obviously inconsistent with his own presentation
• “….headline is also terribly misleading, and the worst kind of journalism.
• “In the absence of facts, smear with insinuation
“They got it wrong completely. Flying is relatively safe because we have made it so by
managing inherent risk and minimizing operational risk; piling on manufacturers with
exaggerated claims, bloated numbers and inaccurate conclusions does not help us advance
toward a better record of safety. USA Today made itself part of the problem rather than
contributing to the solution.”
23. 19th June 2014, 6.00am
The world’s most widely-read aviation magazine
“Pilots, Aviation Leaders Blast USA Today Reporting”
• “….extremely flawed, sensational, one-sided and inaccurate.”
• “….gets the general aviation safety record wrong, it ignores
efforts by the industry to make general aviation safer, and it
violates basic tenets of fairness and accuracy when it comes to
good journalism.”
• “Worst of all, pilots and aviation leaders said, the author of the
article appears to have purposely gone out of his way to
manufacture a crisis that doesn’t exist.”
FLYING
35. In summary
We are already planning to provide an
expert commentator service to the
UK’s rotorcraft community
36. Two final thoughts
Few UK helicopter organisations have
stand-alone plans for communicating
in a crisis.
After the event, they always say that
communications was the hardest part
37. Scenario background
• You are the board of directors of A-List Helicopters
Ltd.
• You sell helicopters and related services (training,
maintenance, management) to high net worth
individuals, especially celebrities.
• You are based at a small airfield in the Home
Counties where you employ 22 people, 15 of whom
are engineers preparing, servicing and maintaining
helicopters.
38. Scenario background
• Some of your customers fly their own aircraft;
others hire your pilots.
• Some of the helicopters in your charge are available
for charter.
• You have been in business since the mid-1980s.
• Your business is successful.
• You are perceived as reliable and straightforward
people to deal with; there has never been a scandal
involving A-List Helicopters.
39. The Scenario
• It is Friday, 5 June, 2015.
• At 11.00am you receive a telephone call from a
man called Jeremy Johnson who says that he is a
journalist at The Sun. He tells you that one of your
customers, 26-year-old Simon Alliss (lead singer of
the band "MF Good” which recently won
television’s "Undiscovered Talent” show), was
injured this morning when his new helicopter
”crashed” while attempting to land in his back
garden.
40. The Scenario
• Before being taken to hospital complaining of back pain,
Alliss managed to Tweet: "It all happened in a flash. The
engine stopped and the next thing I knew I was bouncing
on the ground and it all went a bit mad. It was only
serviced last week, which cost a stupid amount of money".
• Alliss’s mum, who was watching him land, has told us "Si
was driving the helicopter beautifully, and then there was
this banging noise. His dad and I blame the mechanic at
the helicopter garage. It can't be Si’s fault - he's a really
careful pilot”.
42. Facing the World
Presenting the Facts in an Emergency
Andrew Healey & Christopher Wigdor
Advancing Blade Communications
Questions?
Editor's Notes
CW: My name is Christopher Wigdor. Since 1983 I have made my living in public relations consultancy; and since the early 90s I have specialised in so-called public relations crisis management, dealing with live crisis situations as well as implementing, testing and exercising crisis management and emergency response plans for businesses and organisations in the financial sector, transportation in the air and on the ground, oil/gas and utilities, amongst others. As it happens, I grew up with helicopters, literally; In fact the first time I came here to Battersea was well over fifty years ago, to watch my old man arriving in a Vertol 107 which was being demonstrated around Europe.
AH: I’m Andy Healey.. I trained to fly in the Royal Navy and landed here many, many times while flying for Alan Mann Helicopters. A dwindling number of you will know me as a journalist, commentator, author and PR consultant with a lot of experience of the rotorcraft sector.
Three years ago Christopher and I opened for business as Advancing Blade Communications, to provide PR, crisis management, training, testing and exercising services to the aviation sector.
Our short presentation today focuses upon what we perceive to be a very real need within the rotorcraft sector - especially for those businesses which either operate helicopters or provide direct services to operators. We believe they should be competent, practised and ready to communicate effectively in the event of accidents and incidents.
Almost every time there is an incident involving a helicopter in the UK, whether it be offshore or onshore, the resulting media coverage raises more questions than answers. And those questions are more often than not, founded in ignorance and/or lack of preparedness. The fact is, communications is always the poor relation when it comes to addressing accidents and other unexpected incidents.
Post-mortems always highlight this inadequacy/failure.
Yet a worryingly small proportion of UK helicopter people and businesses have current emergency response plans and programs for training and exercising themselves in this regard.
We won't discuss any recent UK incidents here today. What we can do, however, is describe a typical chain of events: Over to you Christopher
CW: Let’s assume that there has been an incident involving a helicopter, probably involving a loss of life.
How will you get to hear about it?
In the past, the grapevine may have given you a heads-up
Nowadays it will be all over social media within minutes.
We have all seen how quickly it spreads.
Speculation will follow swiftly
Any comments made by anybody involved, or perceived as having been involved, will be treated by the media as "fact".
Any comments made by those who say that they saw or heard something, will be treated as fact
The media will wheel out a range of "usual suspects" as expert commentators. There can be few if any in this room today who have not listened to, or read such commentary without swearing under their breath at their ill-informed and damaging remarks. It has been this way for years, and will continue to be so unless somebody does something both radical and sensible……..more about that in a minute….
Confusion does reign – where it can do the most damage
There’s a human cost for all those involved directly – family, friends, colleagues, and for those involved indirectly who can and will identify with the tragedy.
And there’s a reputational cost for the aviation world in general, and the helicopter sector in particular.
And that reputational loss will last for a very long time because every bit of the story – the inaccuracies as well as the truth - will be filed in media databases to be referenced the next time something happens. And those databases go back a very long way – August 1989 Marchioness: 111 years earlier, September 1878 Princess Alice returning from Gravesend, collided with the cargo steamer Bywell Castle, 650 lost.
The media forgets nothing….
So that’s how a story develops, and we know the usual result. Andy…….
AH: We have all seen these headlines, and can only imagine the damage (human and reputational) they do. Here are some recent UK examples, can you see them OK? They are meant to be dramatic to pull people in, and they make uncomfortable reading
And here are headlines following the French collision in March, which carry the added frisson of celebrity and reality TV. Note that the left-hand story has nothing to do with helicopters per se – poor Steve Irwin there was I believe stung by a ray! – yet ‘helicopter’ makes the headline anyway
AH: The cycle of ill-informed media, punctuated with potentially damaging remarks made by so-called experts, will continue.
CW: It doesn’t have to be this way
We are in the fortunate position to show what can be achieved when people in the GA community have a plan in place. Some of you will have seen this, which was published in the USA exactly one year ago.
It took the form of a ‘special report’ in USA Today, one of the United States’ few national newspapers…
The basis of this article was that aircraft manufacturers were failing to introduce new safety-critical components because of the expense involved, with inevitable tragic results. It dwelt on the human cost of this perceived crisis and made for a shocking read:
It made a number of sweeping statements:
Older aircraft lack safety gear
Many people die unnecessarily, in post-crash fires
The FAA has a “cost-benefit” approach to safety
Multi-million dollar lawsuits reveal damning evidence
Just 15% of small-aircraft crashes are investigated thoroughly.
You’ll see that USA Today only has a reach of just over 5 million – it does however punch way above its weight in terms of influence, and is used as a source of news by other news organisations.
We don’t know who was behind what you are about to see, but there can be no doubt that it was co-ordinated by various people in the USA’s general aviation sector whose priorities include emergency response planning:
CLICK TO NEXT SLIDE
If you can read this, spend a minute or so reading this strongly-worded rebuttal.
The Huffington Post is the world’s most influential online newspaper.
This story you are about to see appeared on the same day as the USA Today report.
A lot of work will have gone into preparing for this kind of media response rebuttal before it was needed.
And this wasn’t the only response. There were several more, including one from the world’s most widely-read aviation magazine, FLYING
Have a look at this …
So we can see what can be achieved with some thought and preparation and with solid information targeted carefully and properly.
So how can the rotorcraft sector here in the UK achieve such levels of preparedness?
The answer derives from two requirements…..
First, all operators and manufacturers of rotorcraft need to have effective emergency communications plans, which are exercised and tested regularly, and with the same degree of cross fertilisation that already exists within the rotorcraft sector for all aspects of operational safety.
In other words everybody should have a plan, and everybody's plans should have a degree of commonality.
Second, the rotorcraft sector should have at its disposal, with 24/7 readiness, expert commentators who are equipped with up-to-date and reliable facts and figures and sector-specific information covering every aspect of operational safety (current and historic) which can be used in response to any and all media enquiries following an incident.
Industry-wide or one-by-one
There is more than one way to put such a plan in place..
You would expect people like us to suggest this, but the fact is – if you buy in such expertise, you risk losing control, and you never end up with a plan which is 100% your plan.
Doing it yourself on your own is fine, if you are experienced with these things, and if your expertise is current.
Doing it yourself with appropriate guidance will produce a plan quickly, one which absolutely is 100% your plan…..
Once you have a plan in place, then it needs to be exercised and tested at regular intervals, and those of your people who are involved in the communications process directly should be media trained.
Looking at the need for properly informed and genuinely expert media commentators, this is one area which we - that is to say Andy Healey and myself - are addressing already.
We are in the process of assembling a database of incident-specific and aircraft type-specific information, to be accessed in the event of any requirement from the media for expert witness commentary. When that is nearing completion, which will be within a year from now hopefully, we will then begin approaching broadcasters and other media to have ourselves included in their own lists of contacts, as expert witnesses…
So…….in summary….
And…….
And…….
And…….
And a final thought……..
To bring all of this into focus, we are going to end with the type of exercise which we would would recommend that all helicopter businesses practice.
Here is a fictitious scenario….
Here is the background ….
Here is the background ….
Here is the scenario
Here is the scenario
Two questions:
What is your objective?
What are you going to say?
