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Disaster Planning

A leading commercial passenger jet has to make an emergency landing at London’s Heathrow airport after a loss of thrust in the engines.

Key Issues

The key issues can be described in this instance as being: the safety of passengers and staff, confidence of flying with the commercial airliner and their aircraft, the adequacy of airline's staff training for such an emergency and the airport being able to run effectively during and after the incident.

  
Incident outcome

• Commercial airline’s training praised as their staff dealt with this emergency situation in a very calm and professional manner
• Piloting skills widely praised, reflecting well on all the airline’s pilots
• No loss of confidence amongst the travelling public
• Media attention was heavily focused on staff after the event
• Despite airline delays due to a runway being out of use the main media attention was not on delays but on the success of the emergency landing
• Although there were some flight cancellations and delays these were relatively minor
• Business Continuity Management plan worked at every level - operational and strategic; even airline management managed to come out of this looking good

Lessons learnt

• Some media training for staff might have been helpful
• The various different plans all worked well and interacted as expected