By Roz Morris, Managing Director, TV News London Ltd

A very wide range of issues has been raised by the Heathrow electricity substation fire and the subsequent closure of Britain’s busiest airport. These issues are not just about managing a big crisis but also about media management and maintaining positive optics when in the media spotlight.   

There are a number of important questions for Heathrow to answer which didn’t make them look very professional to the public.  For example:

• Why be so vulnerable to the damage to just one electricity substations?
• Why close the entire airport when two other electricity substations were available?
• Why pay a CEO millions of pounds a year so that he can go to bed and leave probably the biggest decision of his career to his deputy?

This is a story which will run and run with official inquiries, parliamentary committees, and potentially court cases to come, and it highlights starkly the importance of thorough crisis management planning combined with professional media management, always alert to avoiding any chance of making things look even worse as a crisis plays out.  

As with so many British ‘disasters’ it wasn’t immediately clear who could be blamed for this unprecedented situation. Was it terrorists?

After the Met Police ruled out crime, National Grid and Heathrow Airport Limited were left in the frame and there was soon a war between them for positive media coverage. National Grid were swift off the mark in the blame game and pointed out there were two other electricity substations which their CEO claimed could have been used to keep the airport going. Heathrow stuck to their claim that they had to shut everything down for safety reasons.

The airlines, so often criticised by passengers for delays, were for once in the clear in that they didn’t cause the problem. But, they did have to deal with the huge difficulties of re-routing and landing hundreds of planes as well as an estimated three hundred thousand frustrated passengers stranded at airports across the world. The airlines, especially British Airways, piled a lot of criticisms onto Heathrow and its apparent lack of resilience planning.

Then a new issue came up. The media found out that that Thomas Woldbye, the CEO of Heathrow Limited – the top man who was paid £3.2 million last year – had actually been asleep in bed when the decision was taken to shut down the entire airport.

The media jumped on this, and headlines abounded like The Sun’s accusing summary: SLEEPING ON THE JOB  Why Heathrow boss went to BED & let his deputy close airport while inferno raged leaving 300,000 passengers in limbo.

Things didn’t improve for Heathrow when the Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said she would have struggled to sleep if she had been running the airport and both she and Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused to give backing for Woldbye when questioned by the media.

Crisis management experts then pointed out that it is normal practice for a large organisation to establish two teams to handle a crisis so that 24-hour coverage can be provided. CEOs have to cope with stresses and strains of a big crisis and can’t do this on no sleep.

At TV News London we work with expert crisis management consultants, Incident Ready Consulting. We provide media interviews as for real during crisis management exercises. This provides valuable experience for executives who are under pressure while taking part in a realistic crisis exercise.

Justin Cuckow, Managing Director of Incident Ready Consulting, told me he believes Heathrow acted correctly in terms of management of the incident. However, the fire did show up some causes for concern in terms of resilience.

“Going forwards we might anticipate the Civil Aviation Authority mandating these tests for airports – they need to be able to demonstrate resilience “ Justin says. “Similarly, Insurance companies on the hook for Business Interruption claims would be prudent to set standards for contingency capabilities and exercising. Too often the effectiveness of contingency planning is simply untested and unknown.”

What the Heathrow incident and the management of it has made clear is just how important crisis media management is. Just giving narrow operational statements and being tin-eared about how the public will perceive your statements will not gain positive coverage and Heathrow Airport fell into that trap.

No matter what the crisis management manual says about conserving top management energy and the fact that the person in charge of the night team is the COO – Chief Operating Officer – and so an expert on technical issues – where was common sense? 

Why didn’t the night team ring up the CEO and wake him up? After all, presidents and prime ministers get woken up when there is a serious crisis, and they don’t get paid as much as Thomas Woldbye.

Heathrow’s media management also came into question over the issue of why on earth did anyone at the company tell the media that the CEO was in bed so he could be ‘well rested’ for the next day? This was always going to look bad to the media and the public and was a bad error.

In addition, it became clear that Mr Woldbye, who is Danish and previously ran Copenhagen Airport, wasn’t very used to media interviews and thinking about the public and passengers not just the airport shareholders.  Heathrow is owned by the French asset management business, Ardian, as well as wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Singapore and China and Australia’s retirement trust, none of which seek out media coverage.  

Mr Woldbye didn’t do very well in his radio interview when challenged on his role by Emma Barnett on BBC Radio 4 Today Programme. He also attracted criticism for claiming the airport had “come back quite fast”. Which didn’t seem very accurate to the thousands of passengers still stranded and trying to get back to the UK.

A spokesperson for Heathrow Airport also faced disapproval when they described the shutdown operation as a success. They claimed their teams had a quick response to a challenging situation and worked tirelessly to ensure a speedy recovery, so they were able to safely begin some flights later on the day of the incident.

This came across as rather like the old joke about the surgeon who comes out of the operating theatre and says: “The operation was a success, but the patient died.”

Within the crisis management sector Heathrow has received praise for bringing back the eco-system that supports such a complex operation in under 24 hours. So, credit to them where it’s due, but their handling of the media has demonstrated the very real negative power of optics. How things look during a crisis really does matter.

This was a huge crisis, damaging for Britain’s reputation around the world, but you too could find yourself in the news with your own problems and the serious possibility of costly reputation damage.

Would you be able to cope?

To learn more about how TV News London can help you prepare for crises email info@tvnewslondon.co.uk