Introduction
This is “What Just Happened?,” the podcast that looks at the biggest brand crises of our time, what they meant for organisational strategy and behaviour, and their lasting impact on our approach to crisis communication.
I’m Kate Hartley. And I’m Tamara Littleton. And together, we’ll delve into what happened, why it mattered, and whether it could happen again.
Episode
Kate Hartley: We’re going back today to March 2014, to the beginning of a crisis that has never been resolved and is possibly the greatest mystery in aviation history. So today, we’re going to talk about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
Tamara Littleton: I know we’re going to change things up a bit today, Kate, so we can spend a bit longer speaking to our guest expert, Rod Cartwright, who was directly involved with the response to this awful and tragic accident. Before we bring Rod in, though, Kate, can you recap what we know and what happened?
KH: Yes, so on the 8th of March 2014, a Boeing 777 aircraft operated by Malaysia Airlines under flight number MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur (KL) at 12:41 local time. It was headed for Beijing, where it was scheduled to land at about 6:30 in the morning local time, and it had 227 passengers and 12 crew on board. Two hours after it took off, Malaysia Airlines announced that it had lost contact with the aircraft. The aircraft had disappeared from civilian radar just as it left Malaysian airspace and entered Vietnamese airspace over the South China Sea at what’s known in aviation terms as a waypoint. In this case, it was waypoint Igari, and that flight never reached its destination.
TLL And there are still, to this day, so many unknowns. But what do we know?
KH: I’ll focus on what we do know, as opposed to what we don’t. We don’t know definitively what happened, of course, because the aircraft has never been found.
But what we do know is that it crashed. We know it went miles off course. What we don’t know, and this is really important, is why and how that happened. The plane was last tracked by military radar at 2:14 on the 8th of March. It was heading over the Straits of Malacca, some distance west of its planned flight path, and it made an almost complete U-turn, which, according to experts, is quite hard to do, indicating it was a deliberate action by someone on board.
We know it continued to fly for seven hours. A UK-based satellite company, Inmarsat, received what’s known as handshakes from the flight. These are effectively pings that go from the plane to satellites, confirming that the plane is still airborne, but they don’t provide precise location data. Experts plotted various possible flight paths based on those pings, which gave the search operation an area of 120,000 square kilometres where the flight was most likely to have come down in the southern Indian Ocean.
Then, a week after the flight was lost, the Malaysian Prime Minister at the time, Najib Razak, said that the plane’s communications were deliberately disabled and that the authorities believed this was deliberate action by someone on the aircraft. On the 24th of March, he said that the flight had almost certainly crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, and there would likely be no survivors. A mammoth search operation followed over the next few years to try and find the aircraft, with multiple countries sending ships, surveillance aircraft, undersea tracking robots, you name it. They searched that absolutely vast area of 120,000 square kilometres of ocean. And you know, it’s not a calm sea; this is a really rough, dangerous, and stormy ocean area, making it incredibly difficult to search.
Then, in July 2015, the Australian authorities said that the plane would be found within a year. But a year later, when it hadn’t been found, they said it was becoming less likely that it would ever be found. Over the years, various parts of the aircraft wreckage have been found. The first piece was found on Réunion Island more than a year later, and analysts cleverly recreated how that debris might have moved through the ocean over time. This allowed them to give a slightly narrower estimation of where the aircraft could be. Various other parts of the aircraft have been found in South Africa, Mauritius, and Zanzibar.
But in January 2017, the search officially ended. However, what’s really interesting is that this year, 10 years later, the search is likely to resume, based on new analysis that tracks how radio signals are disturbed by aircraft. This analysis can track that disturbance back to the day of the disappearance to plot the most likely flight path of MH370, giving a slightly different search area just outside the original 120,000 square kilometres that was identified. Reports suggest that the search is likely to start at the end of this year. This is obviously absolutely horrific for families who still don’t have answers or know what happened to their loved ones. As you both know, my brother’s father was killed in a helicopter crash, and the wreckage wasn’t found for 30 years. Not having those answers is unimaginably horrific for the families.
The trouble is that when you don’t have answers, conspiracy theories thrive. If nothing is clear, we fill that vacuum with theories. There were all sorts of theories, both official and unofficial, about what might have happened. These range from more credible theories, like whether the pilot was incapacitated or whether this could have been a hijacking, to the less credible, such as the plane being landed and deliberately hidden by a hostile government agency, for example. And of course, when there are no facts, the media jumps on the story and asks everyone for their views, from every aviation or transport expert to every amateur sleuth, private investigator, and even psychic mediums.
TL: The public just get involved, don’t they?
KH: They really do. Everyone has a theory about what happened, and these theories really thrive. But the fact is that the aircraft has never been found, and until it is found, we cannot know why it disappeared from the radar, why it went off course, or even where it ended up. So what we’re not going to do today is speculate about the cause of the disappearance—there are already too many people doing that, frankly. But what we can do is look at some of the communication around it, the challenges of communicating in that kind of environment, and, really importantly, the lessons we can take from this for people who handle the most serious of crises—those crises that involve life and death.
TL: Thank you for that. That’s great context and a great reminder of what happened and what is known. As you said, we’re steering away from what we don’t know. It would be a good time now to bring in our guest. Rod Cartwright is our guest today. Rod runs his own consultancy specialising in issues and crisis preparedness and crisis management, and he, of course, has first-hand experience of this crisis. So I want to thank Rod for joining us here today and for being here and sharing with us. I’m going to start by asking, Rod, what was your role in this, and how did you come to be in Kuala Lumpur?
Rod Cartwright: Hi, both, and thank you for having me. As you’ve both said so eloquently, this is a deeply complex and, as you say, unresolved issue, where we may never know the answers. To your question about how I was involved, I was working in one of the international agencies, and one of my colleagues in Singapore was brought in by the insurers on day three, the 11th of March.
A team member was brought in, realised almost immediately that this was going to be absolutely enormous, not least in media terms. Within days, this had become the global news story—every media organisation, local, regional, and global, was all over it. So he phoned the international CEO and said, ‘I need a team, and I need these three people.’ I was one of a team of four in total, flown into Kuala Lumpur from London. I arrived, I think, on the 15th of March. So we came in, which, of course, meant that quite a lot had already happened with the trajectory of the story and the trajectory of the search.
We arrived a week in and were basically working under the head of the Emergency Operations Centre, who happens to be the current chief executive of the airline, ultimately working under the chairman and chief executive but via the EOC, and we were part of a fairly sizable infrastructure, both operationally and in communications terms. There was the entire in-house infrastructure, both operationally and in terms of comms, marketing, and legal. Obviously, there was a very sizable search operation, potentially ultimately a search and recovery operation, going on.
A very, very important and fairly well-resourced Family Care and Family Assistance Team was working closely with external advisors, a company called AVM, who were supporting them on all the facets of family care and assistance, which we can come back to later on. But I think it’s also critical to remember that the airline at the time was 69% state-owned, so in parallel to the Malaysia Airlines infrastructure was the entire weight of the Malaysian government run by the Prime Minister’s Office. This was an event of global, but particularly national, significance. It’s very hard to overestimate the extent to which Malaysia Airlines, as a name and brand, is woven into the fabric of Malaysian society and mentality. So the Prime Minister’s Office, the Acting Minister of Transport—huge amounts of the operational decision-making and communications flow—were actually determined not by the airline itself, which we were advising, but by the government, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Ministry of Transport.
KH: That leads to so much. It’s such a complex situation, isn’t it? I want to pick up on that because you said you were brought in by the insurers. I’d like to explore that before we delve a little more into the communications—about the logistics of how this was run, because I think a lot of communications people don’t necessarily realise, in these really big incidents, how many people there are to liaise with and where communications fit into that. Can you talk a little about that?
RC: Coordination is absolutely fundamental, both operationally and in communications. It’s almost a truism to say this. It was, as an aside, one of the hallmarks of certain other crises that are not held up as world-class examples—like the BP Gulf of Mexico issue—where the comms team, I’m led to believe, and the operational team met every day at the same time but in different locations. I bring that up only to remind people how crucial coordination is. So as much as attempts were made to coordinate everything operational and communications-related via the EOC, that dual running of the airline effort and the government effort made things particularly challenging, given the standing and importance of Malaysia Airlines to Malaysia’s identity—the very core of how it defines itself.
KH: I think I know what you’re going to say to this, but what were the challenges? Because, I mean, there obviously sound like there were huge challenges, particularly, as you said, in balancing the government and the airline. But what were the big challenges that you found?
RC: Well, I think, you know, one of the things we talked about very often was that this was an unprecedented event requiring an unprecedented response. For the aviation geeks—and that is a community, by the way—there had been the loss of an airline in 1995, the disappearance, but this was the first genuine aviation mystery in the social media age. There are a couple of anecdotes to bring that to life. Three little maxims kept us all going.
One of my colleagues, rather brilliantly, said on day one, ‘I don’t wish to sound cold-hearted, but at a simple level, there was a plane. Now there’s no plane. Everything else is detail.’ I thought that was unbelievably wise. The second comment that again was part of our North Star psychologically was another colleague said, ‘There’s no playbook for this. And even if there was, we’d probably have to rip it up anyway.’ Then my rather brilliant wife, who you both know, as I left for Heathrow, wisely said, ‘Remember this: unless and until they find the plane, this will only ever be degrees of bad.’ Again, that was not being doom-laden; it was just a pragmatic reality.
So I think there is that question of an unprecedented event requiring an unprecedented response. I’ve already mentioned the coordination challenges of government ownership, the government machine, and the Prime Minister’s Office. It goes without saying that there was the fundamental point that there was no information. There was a complete information vacuum. I was reminded of something Richard Quest of CNN said in his book: he said that the CEO, AJ, found himself in an impossible situation. He and his airline had nothing to offer, not even the promise that information would be forthcoming, still less the return of their loved ones. They were doomed.
Again, that sounds terribly downbeat, but it’s quite a good summary of the fundamental daily reality we had of an information vacuum into which stepped the social media community and the media with misinformation, disinformation, and waves of ever more fanciful speculation. We mustn’t forget, and we can talk about this later, that a lot of the media, particularly CNN, and I’ve said this publicly before, had doubled down on a strategy weeks before of putting everything on the biggest stories. They may have driven their viewer numbers through the roof, but there were many times when—how would I put this—their approach sat on that fine dividing line between public interest journalism and infotainment. There were times when, if the Wi-Fi went down, we didn’t have access to things, so there were times when it’s the littlest things that can have the biggest impact. Those are a few of the challenges we faced on a daily, if not hourly, basis.
KH: Before we talk about the media response, I want to pick up on one thing first, which is the misinformation. You said you had no information, and so, of course, the misinformation fills that vacuum, doesn’t it? This might lead us on to the media response, but how do you monitor that level of disinformation and conspiracy theory, and how do you deal with it when you don’t have facts to counter that information with?
RC: A few thoughts on that, which are part of the fundamental, evergreen best practice principles of really good crisis comms. One is that you can monitor all you like. Frankly, I wish 10 years ago we’d had access to the range of tools that are available these days, like NewsWhip Spike, Brandwatch, etc., which give you really accurate, real-time data, not just about what’s going on and the sentiment—whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral—but also the potential trajectory and duration of the story. We didn’t have any of those things, but I think that even with world-class tech, you still need to stand back from the data and work out what the human insights are that inform decision-making, because at the end of the day, that’s what a crisis is—making very difficult, pivotal decisions based on the information that you have.
The problem is we had none. So, point two, therefore, is not to jump on any passing speculative bandwagon. Believe me, we had daily requests to join surreal panels on whether the plane was lifted away by a UFO and whether the 239 souls on board were sitting on this UFO being whisked away to a far-off planet. I’m not exaggerating; those were the requests we had. Therefore, the third thing that drove our approach was constant scenario planning. I think on average, we had 14 to 15 foreseeable scenarios for which we created content and materials, overall and per stakeholder, for everything that could conceivably happen, so that if it did happen, we were as ready as we could possibly be.
TL: Yes, so let’s dig into that media response. I do want to pick up on those conspiracy theories. Are you saying that the news outlets and media response were stoking the flames of the conspiracy theories themselves?
RC: That would be a very accurate but accusatory way of phrasing it, and I’d probably be quite careful in my choice of language. But you know when media organisations are running panels—and it’s the same today—you know, editorially, you alight on something that sounds interesting and vaguely plausible, you assemble a panel of so-called experts from all over the world, and many were truly technically expert in their fields. But you know, there was everything from psychics to UFO theorists. I’m not going to give oxygen to a load of theories that simply have never been substantiated and have since been covered as if they were potential facts from a documentary perspective. So, were the media fanning the flames?
I don’t think that editorial approach was desperately helpful. I said in discussing this at a conference once that there’s a very fine dividing line between public interest journalism and private grief. Both editorially and in terms of the conduct of some frontline journalists, I think a number of media organisations crossed that line on a relatively regular basis. Another anecdote, which again was public domain, was that at one point a media organisation, who will remain nameless, asked the airline if they could borrow or charter a plane to recreate the early hours of the disappearance of the flight, and did the airline want to put a member of the management team on board to narrate that? To which we said, ‘If you’re asking us whether we want to be complicit in recreating the potential, if not likely, death of 239 souls, the answer is patently no.’
So I think we were driven not just by practicality but by fundamental human ethics and morality—doing the right thing above all else, a long way above all else. The right thing for those on board—the 227 passengers and the 12 crew and flight deck—and, of course, their many, many family members and friends.
TL: I can only imagine that social media was blowing up at the time as well. I appreciate you kind of reliving it at the moment, but what was that like with social media?
RC: It was essentially exactly as you’d imagine it to be, only multiplied by a factor of between 10 and 100 on a daily basis. The wall of social media activity interacting with the wall of editorial media activity combined to make this—I mean, to say we felt like we were in a goldfish bowl doesn’t even come close.
TL: We talk a lot about the importance of empathy in crisis communication. A tragedy like this really highlights how important it is to have compassion and empathy when you’re operating in an environment that I can only imagine must be so highly emotive. Are you able to talk a little bit about that, Rod?
RC: I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I think about this very frequently because the way I describe it, it was an impossible privilege to be involved in something of this magnitude. It was enormous. But we were dealing with the impossible, which is communication with no information. Two main thoughts struck me. One is that, you know, if we as crisis experts look at the standard definition of a crisis, which is an event of such magnitude that it can fundamentally impact reputation and business as usual, it struck me that that’s very centred on the organisation itself.
We think about what it does to us, but in reality, one of my main lessons from this impossible privilege experience is that ultimately crises are, if you like, human events with profoundly real human consequences that require a deeply human response based, as you say, on human empathy. But we’ve talked about this often—empathy that is then operationalised, empathy that is turned into action, because empathy without action risks just being warm words. I think the empathy was critical, but as far as it was possible for anybody to do, turning that empathy into operational action. I think that was predominantly, not even mainly, a comms thing; it was about the profound amount of effort and resource put into support for the families. There were Family Assistance Centres, dedicated caregivers for every single family member, a Family Support Centre, almost immediate financial assistance. So I think remembering that empathy is not merely a communications thing, it’s an operational thing centred around the human beings so profoundly impacted.
KH: Can we talk a little bit about trust as well, which kind of leads on from that, I think? There was a horrific few hours right at the very start of the crisis, well before you got out there, where the flight was showing as delayed because they didn’t know what else to show it as. It hadn’t arrived, and they didn’t know where it was, so it was just showing on the flight board as delayed. Obviously, that wasn’t the case, and I wonder whether that set a course for the lack of trust that people had for some of the official information that was coming out—not necessarily from the airline, but perhaps from the government. Can you talk a little bit about how important it is to retain the trust of people in a situation like that, even when you don’t have any information, and any insights you have as to how you can do that?
RC: Absolutely, and I think a key point to your observation about retaining trust—in a way, a lot of this was about regaining trust, because, as you say, we weren’t involved until well into the crisis. But the fact that, of the 227 people on board, 152 were Chinese nationals, and you particularly had a very, very understandably vocal community of family members of those Chinese nationals who felt that they had been fundamentally misled in the early hours. As you say, I’m not saying that it was easy to decide what to do, but whatever the rights and wrongs of what was or wasn’t done in the early hours, once people found out that the departure boards had said ‘delayed’ at a point when it was known that contact had been lost, trust was fundamentally damaged, potentially irreparably so.
We talk about the golden hour, and I think this is a very powerful example of how the opening hours fundamentally set the trajectory. The rest is therefore about taking whatever level you have of trust, maintaining it where you’re able, and recovering it. But it was very, very difficult in the absence of any information. As a taxi driver said to me once when I was coming back from Heathrow during my regular commute to KL, ‘The problem is, just as nature abhors a vacuum, human beings don’t believe that this plane has disappeared.’ I mean, you can’t put your mobile phone on a table without it being triangulated. How can a 777 disappear in 2014?
KH: You talked about the lack of trust. Is that because it was coming from the government? Do you think if it had been a non-state-owned airline, that trust would have been there, or is that just not the case? What were the challenges of communication by the airline versus the government, and what you were and weren’t allowed to say?
RC: It’s impossible to say whether state ownership really had any fundamental impact on the overall level of trust. It certainly had an impact on what the airline could or couldn’t say. You may remember the daily press conferences held in this cavernous downstairs conference room in the hotel with the Acting Minister for Transport, senior members of the Malaysian military, senior government officials, and then the chief executive standing at the end of the line, very often not allowed to say anything.
One of our objectives was to somewhat get the airline out from under the weight of the state and remind people that these were flyers. Aviation people exist to fly people safely from point A to point B in the most relaxing and enjoyable way possible. So reminding people of the human elements—the commitment of aviators to do that within the parameters of what they could or mainly couldn’t say given the government’s control of things.
Bear in mind that it wasn’t just about the government. It’s about the fact that international aviation law says that in the event of a loss, overall management is a function of the country of the point of departure and the country where the loss has taken place. Of course, normally, with a crash, you know where the plane is. The reason Australia ended up being so centrally involved after the 24th of March is that all the Inmarsat data suggested a trajectory that meant the plane was likely to be in the southern Indian Ocean, as you’ve said.
TL: I’m just going to finish on resilience. I think this is something we talk a lot about, but thinking this is now 10 years on, are there any lessons learned around how you look after your team going through this? Is there anything that you’re happy to share?
RC: Sure. I probably won’t personalise this, but if you were to ask me, from that experience, what I would advise others to do, here are a few quick thoughts. One is that what I’d call active pastoral care is really important, both during and after. It’s important to really understand the pressures that team members are under and provide whatever support is possible at that point, while also remembering that exposure to this kind of event leaves a mark, put bluntly, and therefore the pastoral care needs to continue even when people have come home. I think, as a team, knowing your limits, individually and collectively, is vital. I remember a colleague from the US who had terrible jet lag from flying over 16 times.
There were times when the jet lag was such that it was just like, ‘Right, you need to go to bed. We’ve got this.’ It’s about the loyalty of team members to each other and to themselves. Obviously, rostering where you can, trying to take downtime—if I had even 20 minutes, I’d jump in the pool and swim frantically to get myself out of my head. Of course, trying to find downtime and using whatever minimal downtime you have to best effect is important. But yes, if there’s anything I’d say, it’s active pastoral care during and after.
TL: I want to say thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. Is there anything that we haven’t asked you, or do you have any closing thoughts that you’d like to share?
RC: One other fundamental point is that they talk about politics being the art of the possible. I think the same applies to crisis communications. Very often, you just have to deal with what’s in front of you. We had this sort of mantra that we travelled in hope but worked with reality. I think dealing with the world as it is, rather than the world as you would wish it to be, is really, really important. My only other closing thought would be that we were just talking about resilience and team, and I cannot stress enough—I mean, you both know I’m obsessed with the idea of human preparedness—that you can have all the infrastructure in the world, but unless your team are trained, prepared, and ready as individuals and as a team, you won’t succeed.
One of the reasons for whatever limited success, whatever limited mark we were able to make, was that as a core team, we intuitively knew our relative strengths and therefore configured our roles and responsibilities around those. That wasn’t because there was some manual that said Rod does this, X does that, and Y does the other; it was because we just knew who was good at what. So, in line with my overall mantra that it’s all about human preparedness to respond in a human way to human events, it’s all about the people, their cohesion, and their clarity of roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities.
Outro
You’ve been listening to “What Just Happened?” with Kate Hartley and Tamara Littleton. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review.