STATES OF EMERGENCY - Patrick Lagadec

136 Technological crises and the actors involvedanything. We'd tried to hook up with this initiative, and our director generalsaid, "Good! If you're giving a press conference, I'll come."I can still picture Laurent bursting into the room, at the back of the crowd,calling, "Hey! Hey!" and trying to interrupt whoever was talking then, to say,"I've spoken with the chairman of Eastern. He's maintaining his flights. Thewhole story is false, there's nothing in it."By midnight, we were all at home in bed - after the FAA representative inParis had officially apologized! But for four hours, we were deep inside amadhouse.L. DU BOULLAY: You have to admit we were pretty lucky. We got togetherthe competent people really fast, in Paris, Toulouse, and Washington, and wemanaged to reach all the necessary contacts. We got ahold of Eastern's boss,whom we knew well. We could nail down the information from the FAAtechnicians, who quickly recognized that there was a mistake. But for amoment there, things had been slipping out of control fast.P.L.: Could we now take a little distance from this case, and bear in mindmy key questions: what were the most difficult moments, what lessons did youlearn from the experience?CL. FRANTZEN: If you want, I'll try to answer your questions, and then I'lltell you how we saw this crisis.1. What was the hardest day? For me there were two. In the main crisis, asI said, it was the episode in Strasbourg, when the representative from theGerman ministry was backing out on us. We held all the strings, we had aconsistent system in Europe, and all of a sudden an attitude crops up thatcould blow away everything we'd been building for several days, with aconsiderable investment of time and energy. For instance, Laurent had made around trip to Washington in 48 hours and hadn't slept for who knows howlong. The second episode was the arrival at the Ministry of Transportation forthe Airbus pseudo-crisis. The problem in that case was our political and pressmechanisms starting on a hair trigger. We might not have been able to stopthe machine.2. What is the system's weakest part in times of crisis? First of all, the lackof psychological preparation, at all levels. Let me insist on the word"psychological." Because I don't place much stock in well-kept case files, sinceeach crisis is different. But nobody is psychologically ready to face a crisislike that. You have to distinguish between two categories of players: thetechnicians and the politicians. We technicians try to build as strong atechnical base as possible, but we are extremely discreet in dealing with theworld of politics, the law, and the press. We technicians know we're neverperfectly prepared. But the politicians think they're prepared. They tend toimagine that because they've won a few skirmishes, they'll be able to handle amajor crisis. In the case we've been discussing, we had the great fortune tohave a director general who was particularly well prepared. He'd already