TWA Garners Weak Marks for Crisis Management

Trans World Airlines is being weighed in the scales of public relations and found wanting.

Besides New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who continued pounding the airline Friday, a number of crisis-management professionals gave TWA only fair-to-middling marks for its performance following Wednesday night’s crash of Flight 800, which killed 230 people who were aboard a Paris-bound 747-100.

Although experts acknowledged it is too early to draw many conclusions, some said there are already lessons to be learned from the disaster--lessons that apply to corporations involved in any kind of crisis.

For example, several observers said TWA’s top brass should have been more visible in the hours immediately after the crash off the southern coast of Long Island.

“Where’s the compassion?” asked Bill Patterson, a Columbus, Ohio-based “reputation management” consultant. “What I’m not seeing is the chairman of the board of TWA on the Larry King show or the network news expressing deep sympathy and saying, ‘We’ll do anything to get to the bottom of this.’ ”

In fact, Jeffrey H. Erickson, TWA president and chief executive, did express such sentiments Friday in a Long Island news conference broadcast nationwide. However, when the plane went down about 8:40 p.m. EDT Wednesday, he was in London. He scrambled to get a private jet, a TWA spokesman said, but was unable to reach New York until 10 a.m. Thursday.

Which merely illustrates another key principle, according to Robert Irvine, a Louisville, Ky.-based crisis-management consultant. “Murphy’s Law says the prime guy’s going to be out of town when the big one hits, so you have to have a co-pilot,” he said.

Giuliani’s main argument has been that TWA was unreasonably slow to release the list of passengers and crew members aboard the downed aircraft. The former prosecutor has repeatedly implied that airline personnel weren’t working as hard as he and other public officials were to answer the questions of frantic friends and families.

“You’ve got to do better than say, ‘We don’t know and we’re not going to tell you,’ ” Giuliani said in an interview with PBS’ Charlie Rose. The mayor added that there was confusion in the early morning hours after the crash when the TWA executive in charge near the crash scene went home without letting officials know who was taking over.

“The mayor seems to be giving the impression that we just left and turned the lights off, but that’s not true,” said Jonathan Clarke, a spokesman for the airline.

Clarke said that Michael Kelly, the ranking TWA vice president at John F. Kennedy International Airport, where the flight originated, was overseeing the crisis response until he was relieved by Rich Roberts, TWA’s chief pilot and vice president for flight operations. It was they who coordinated the airline’s dealings with federal investigators, public officials and the victims’ friends and relatives, Clarke said.

Meanwhile, Mark Abels, TWA’s top spokesman and also a vice president, handled the bulk of the airline’s national TV interviews.

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Although those executives may be competent, experts said companies ought to put higher-level people--executive vice president and above--out front in a crisis.

“Most people want to hear from the top gun,” said Aviva Diamond, who heads Blue Streak, a Los Angeles-based speech training and communications consulting firm.

Although Exxon Corp. eventually spent billions of dollars in reparation and cleanup costs after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the energy giant gave the initial--and lasting--impression that it was uncaring because then-Chairman Lawrence G. Rawl was slow to appear publicly, Diamond said.

“People make up their minds very quickly in a crisis situation, so there’s a very limited window of opportunity to do it right,” she said.

Beyond compassion for the bereaved families, the public’s foremost concern is, “what happened and can it happen again?” said Los Angeles public-relations consultant Michael Sitrick, a specialist in corporate emergencies. A company in crisis needs to take positive action against a repetition of the problem.

If, for example, authorities blame the disaster on a terrorist attack, Sitrick said, “you bring in the top security expert in the country, maybe a retired FBI chief, and announce a full review of your security procedures.”

According to Edward Segal, a Washington, D.C., consultant, TWA has done some things right. “They have not hidden or repeated rumors or cast blame”--three of the “thou shalt nots” among Segal’s Ten Commandments of crisis communications.

But Segal faulted CEO Erickson for not using all the technology at his disposal to show he was in command of the situation, even if he happened to be in London when the crash occurred. “Why not go on camera in London or do telephone interviews from the plane?” he asked, adding, “People should be told the president is on his way and that he’ll move heaven and earth to get to the crash scene.”

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The holdup in notifying the victims’ families stems in part from the fact that it isn’t always easy to locate the individual who needs to be contacted, said Bob Wilkerson, a Washington, D.C., crisis consultant. He suggested that airlines might adopt a policy of asking customers for the names and phone numbers of people to be notified in case of an emergency. That could shrink the response time by many hours, he said.

On the other hand, Wilkerson acknowledged a solution such as that might pose certain marketing problems. “Travelers might not find it comforting when they show up at the ticket counter,” he said, “and are asked the name of their next of kin.”