Steve Shannon
The amazing landing of US Airways flight 1549, and its miraculous outcome, sure is chock full of lessons that can be applied to business and public relations. (It sure was the talk of our office here at BurrellesLuce.) One can certainly point to the cool, reasoned response and the experience of the pilots to what can mildly stated as an unmitigated disaster and draw lessons from it. However, how will other pilots truly learn from such an experience?
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal noted that water landings, known as “ditchings” in the flying world, aren’t even covered in pilots’ simulator time on account of their rarity. It’s basically only covered in theory during ground school. The article closes by saying that now, with specific data points about 1549’s flight (retrieved from omnipresent “black boxes” referred to in media stories on aviation mishaps), that data can be fed into simulators so that pilots can indeed practice gliding and ditching into water.
In my years of working with countless clients on an even greater number of media relations campaigns I was dismayed, more frequently than not, to discover many clients took off without their own black box – a measurement program to record and assess their performance.
While anecdotal evidence, such as interviewing the client (or pilots), will yield some information about what went right and what didn’t, only hard data will allow the dedicated professional, and the organization, to truly learn and continue to replicate what went right, and what not to do again. To do other wise is known as “flying by the seat” of your pants – something that doesn’t work too often in aviation, or media relations.
