I have a friend who, some time ago, instructed me to switch my phone on to silent when I went to bed. “But what if there is an emergency that needs my attention?” I protested (at the time, I had a job that was prone to out-of-hours crises). “In which case,” he replied, “you’re going to need a good night’s sleep so you can tackle it with a clear head.”
If only life were so simple, I remember thinking at the time, and his cheekily facile advice has been brought to mind again with the publication of the report into the power outage that brought Heathrow Airport to a 24-hour standstill in March.
While the conclusion to the review, undertaken by former Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, states that “Heathrow made the right decisions in exceptionally difficult circumstances”, much of the attention since has been directed towards the fact that the airport’s chief executive Thomas Woldbye was uncontactable during the night when a fire at a nearby power substation led to the suspension of all flights for the best part of a day.
Mr Woldbye has been the subject of a pile-in, both online and offline, in the media and even in parliament, and over the weekend, the CEO of Virgin Atlantic added his voice to the chorus of condemnation. “The last time I put my phone on silent when running an airline was – never”, said Shai Weiss. “This is a 24/7 job.” Much has been made, too, of the fact that Mr Woldbye is paid £3.2m a year to run Heathrow (while clearly a substantial salary, it nevertheless doesn’t seem out of kilter with a job of such responsibility).
And so it is entirely in keeping with contemporary conventions that a complicated and nuanced set of issues, like the need for investment in power infrastructure at the airport and the long-term strategies for resilience, growth and net zero, should be reduced to a single, easily understood, and personally identifiable matter, like whether Mr Woldbye was – literally, in this case – asleep at the wheel.
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The fact that Ms Kelly’s report into the incident states that, had Mr Woldbye been awake through the night, it would have “had no impact” on the decisions made during that time, has been treated of little consequence. No one has, as far as I can see, commended Mr Woldbye on his achievement in establishing a command structure at Heathrow that didn’t require his presence or input during an emergency. That, surely, is a vitally important part of a chief executive’s job.
It is also remarkable that Mr Woldbye, a 61-year-old man, didn’t wake up between midnight and 6.45am. I know of very few men of his age, and particularly those who have such demanding jobs, who are able to sleep non-stop for seven hours. That speaks of both his mental equilibrium and physical fitness – just the sort of person, in fact, who would be most suited to the running of one of the world’s busiest airports.
There is also the question of our reliance on mobile phones as the sole means of communication. I assume that Mr Woldbye lives within commuting distance of Heathrow, so it’s not beyond reason that someone could have been deputed to go the CEO’s house and wake him up. And maybe one of the learnings of this incident for all business leaders is that they should have a secondary means of communication in the event of emergency. A good old landline, perhaps?
In any case, it strikes me as rather unfair that Mr Woldbye should now be synonymous with corporate failure. The power outage was not his fault, and the correct decisions were made by the Heathrow executive in the face of an unprecedented chain of events. I am not qualified to speak on whether Mr Woldbye is good at his job or not, but he is immensely experienced, and it would be a regressive step if he felt he had to resign as a result of his somnolent, temporary unavailability, for which he has expressed his regret. Public outrage is not always a reason to throw the towel in.
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