At 11:40 pm last night, a plane hit a fire truck on the runway at LaGuardia. At 2:45 am, Air Canada posted on X. Three hours and five minutes. In a crisis, that’s a lifetime.<\/p>\n
I want to be fair. It was the middle of the night. People were scrambling. Nobody wants to say the wrong thing. I understand all of that. What I also understand is what was happening while Air Canada was quiet: every mainstream media outlet had the story. Social media had video. Families watching the news had no idea if their person was on that plane.<\/p>\n
Silence in a crisis is not neutral. Someone else fills it.<\/p>\n
When Jazz Aviation’s President finally spoke that morning, the words were right: ‘Today is an incredibly difficult day for our airline, our employees, and most importantly, the families and loved ones of those affected.’ That’s the right human instinct. Delivered too late. There was also the matter of Air Canada describing the two pilots killed as ‘two Jazz employees.’ I understand the corporate structure. Their passengers don’t care.<\/p>\n
Here’s the script I give every executive who asks what to say when they don’t yet have all the facts: ‘We know there’s been an incident. We’re on site. We’re gathering information. We’ll update you the moment we know more. If you have a loved one on this flight, call this number.’<\/p>\n
That’s it. That’s enough. That’s everything.<\/p>\n
Air Canada did eventually set up a hotline and issue a full statement. Both were the right moves. Both were late.<\/p>\n
The first hour of a crisis is the most consequential hour a leader will ever have. Don’t spend it being careful. Spend it being present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At 11:40 pm last night, a plane hit a fire truck on the runway at LaGuardia. At 2:45 am, Air Canada posted on X. Three hours and five minutes. In a crisis, that’s a lifetime. I want to be fair. It was the middle of the night. People were scrambling. Nobody wants to say the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions\/74"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}