The Phone Call That Told Us Our Flights Were Grounded, And How We Survived That Crisis.

Sep 25

7 min read

When the FAA grounded our plane, we didn't get a warning. We Got a Choice.

The phone rang in our Anchorage office, and by the time John hung up, we knew we had a plane load of passengers sitting in Hawaii with nowhere to go. The airline we were chartering our planes from had just been grounded by the FAA, and when the FAA grounds you, you don't get a week's notice, you don't even get a day's notice, you get one sentence: that plane is not going anywhere, and neither is any other plane in that carrier's fleet. My first thought wasn't how bad this is. It was how many of our people are stuck in Hawaii right now, and how are we getting them home?

And this is where John's particular talent came in, because within the hour he was on the phone to a completely different airline, having to grovel a little and say, essentially, I need your plane, and I need it now. We paid through the nose for it. We were going to pay whatever it took, because that was the R in what we built into WERQ, our culture framework: win-win, efficiency, responsibility, quality. Responsibility meant something specific to us that day. Those were our passengers, stranded by a decision we didn't make, and getting them home was ours to solve, not theirs.

Nobody warns you that the hardest part of a crisis isn't the crisis itself; it's the two hours right after it lands, when you could still talk yourself into waiting to see how it shakes out. We didn't have that luxury, and honestly, I don't think we would have taken it if we did. The moment we knew people were stranded, the only question that mattered was who was responsible for fixing it, and there was never an answer that wasn't us. Not the FAA. Not the carrier that got grounded. Us.

That's the part of WERQ people skip past when they hear the acronym, because efficiency and quality sound like the interesting letters. Responsibility is the one that costs you money on a random Tuesday with no warning.

Taking responsibility isn't the most expensive part of a crisis. What’s even more expensive is what would happen if you didn’t step up.

When something breaks that genuinely isn't your fault, is your first move to figure out who owes who an explanation, or to figure out who should fix it, or just take action to make sure it’s handled?

The grounding was the dramatic version of a problem we lived with constantly in smaller doses. Our flight crews flew the same plane both directions, Honolulu to Anchorage and back, and the FAA had a hard ceiling on how many hours a crew could fly before they legally had to rest. If a delay ran long enough - mechanical, weather, whatever it was - the crew would go dead, our term for hitting that ceiling, and there was nothing to negotiate. We had to delay the flight eight or more hours for our crew to be legal again. We didn’t have a spare crew sitting in Anchorage on standby. It was easier for those who lived in Anchorage, where people could just go home. Brutal for the passengers flying in from Fairbanks or the bush who had nowhere to go and no way to get there.

That kind of delay wasn't a one-time emergency we could shrug off as bad luck. It was going to happen again, and again, for as long as we ran the airline, so eventually we stopped treating each one like a surprise and started building actual procedures around it: who calls the hotels to get rooms, who handles rebooking, who makes the decision on comping something before a supervisor even has to be paged. That's the difference between panicking and having a system, and it's the same gap I walk owners through now when I ask where their business breaks the same way twice before anyone fixes the actual cause. I wrote about that gap in more detail in The System Maintenance Trick That Keeps Fast Growth From Breaking Your Business. If a version of this keeps recurring in your business and nobody's built the response into a system yet, my free Owner Diagnostic takes about three minutes and shows you the gap between a company built on systems and one where the operator still makes every call.

A crisis that only happens once is bad luck. A crisis that keeps happening and still doesn't have a system is a choice.

What's the emergency in your business that keeps repeating, the one you've handled well every single time but never actually turned into a procedure?

Somewhere in all of this, we learned something about our passengers that changed how we handled every delay after: the standard airline move- hand out a restaurant voucher and call it customer service- didn't work for us, because our flights ran late at night and the airport restaurants were closed by the time anyone could use it. I'd been that stranded passenger myself on other airlines, barely told what was happening, handed something useless, and left to figure out the rest alone. We weren't going to do that to our people.

So we just started handing out cash. Not a lot, but enough that someone could walk to wherever was still open and get exactly what they wanted instead of what we happened to have a voucher for. It sounds like a small switch. It solved the real problem instead of the appearance of one, which is what separates a policy that looks good on paper from one that actually helps the person standing in front of you at midnight. It's the same instinct behind the onboarding work we eventually built for new agents, training people to ask what the passenger actually needs instead of what the manual says to hand them- the same shift I wrote about in How We Transformed Our Onboarding and Watched Customer Satisfaction Grow.

A voucher for a closed restaurant isn't customer service. It's paperwork with good intentions.

The next time you're about to hand a frustrated customer your standard fix, have you checked whether it actually solves their problem, or just closes yours?

Here's the part that still makes me smile. On some of those very late, very delayed nights, we didn't just hand out cash and call it done. We'd bring bottled water, formula, and diapers for families that didn’t anticipate needing supplies for an extended period. It wasn't going to fix the delay. It wasn't supposed to. But it did remind exhausted people that we cared enough to want to make it better.

That's principle six: delight the customer, don't just satisfy them, and it's easiest to talk about when everything's going right. The real test is whether you still believe in it at midnight, when a flight is hours late, and you have a plane full of people who have every right to be furious at you. Our team believed in it enough to show up with supplies at an hour nobody wants to be at the airport, and that kind of ownership doesn't happen by accident; it happens because the people doing it have been trusted and recognized enough to actually care whether that night went well, the same way I saw it play out in Our Bonus System Story and the Day an Employee Cried.

Satisfying a customer gets you through the complaint. Delighting them is what they tell people about years later.

When something in your business goes wrong through no fault of the customer's, what do you actually do to make sure they still leave glad they chose you?

This Week’s Exercise

Name the last “not our fault” problem that hit your business. Who ended up owning the fix, and did that happen by design or by default?
Find the emergency that keeps recurring in your business, the one you've now handled three or four times. Write down the actual procedure for it instead of relying on everyone's memory of last time.
Look at your standard “we're sorry” response to a customer, whatever it is. Ask honestly whether it solves their actual problem or just closes the ticket.
Pick one way you could delight a customer specifically when something's already gone wrong, not when everything's going right, and put it in front of your team this week.

Podcast Spotlight

What does 40+ years of building — and selling — businesses actually teach you about running one?

I sat down with Sara Troy on the Self Discovery Wisdom podcast to talk about it. The whole arc: a scheduled charter airline flying wide-body jets between Alaska and Hawaii that grew to eight figures in annual revenue and was sold to Alaska Airlines in 2008. Small cruise ships we bought and leased to a cruise line operating in Alaska, Mexico, and the Columbia River. Multifamily syndications across the Sunbelt.

Three very different industries. One thread running through all of them: the businesses that gave us freedom were the ones built to run without us. The ones that nearly broke us were the ones that couldn't.

That's the whole premise behind Livin' the Dream now — I take the six principles that got us from operator to owner and teach them to entrepreneurs who are still stuck running their business instead of owning it.

🎧 Listen to the episode: BB26-37. Ral West’s Livin’ the Dream

Final Thoughts

I still think about that phone call sometimes, how fast it went from an ordinary morning in our Anchorage office to John on the line with a competitor, negotiating for a plane we had no leverage to ask for. We didn't have a playbook for that exact morning. What we had was an answer to one question, already decided long before the FAA ever grounded anybody: when something breaks, we're the ones who fix it, whatever it costs.

That's not a crisis-management tip. It's a decision you make once, in the calm, so you're not making it for the first time at the worst possible moment. This week, find the place in your business where you're still deciding who's responsible at the moment, and decide it now instead, while nothing's on fire.

To your success,

Ral West

Livin’ the Dream