Adam Air missing flight exposes lack of crisis management training

Spare the thought for the relatives of passengers on Adam Air’s flight KI 574. It is bad enough that their relatives have gone missing together with the plane. They now have to endure a roller coaster ride of their emotions because of the incompetence of the authorities, from the Transport Minister down, in handling crisis-like situations.

The first rule of anyone handling a crisis-like situation is to establish the facts. You establish the facts by verifying reports from several sources before going public with it. This is what the Transport Minister Hatta Rajasa failed to do when he blindly announced that the wreckage of KI 574 had been found and that there were 12 survivors.

The minister’s failure was not personal. It was systemic and it culd be traced down from the minister, down to Hasanuddin Air Force Base Commander Eddy Suyatno, down to the police, who apparently started the unverified reports of the plane’s wreckage being found.

That this cavalier attitude toward verifying facts should exist among the uniformed officers is unforgivable. Most military train their commanders and senior officers to assess the quality of information they receive in chaotic situations, such as battlefields, before deciding on a course of action. What could have possessed and Air Force Base Commander to depart from this training, assuming he had it in the first place, is worrying.

Indonesia is a huge archipelago and, given the track record of low cost carriers here, there will certainly be more crisis like situations like Flight KI 574 in the future. No matter how well the industry is regulated accidents are likely to happen. That cannot be helped.

What can be helped, however, is Indonesia’s preparedness to cope with such crisis-like situations in the future. Th knowledge, methods and training cfor risis management is already there; all it takes is for someone high up enough in the government — like the President — to order senior government officials to undergo such training

If they do so, then least something good can come out of Adam Air KI 574: relatives of future crisis-like situations would at least be spared the unnecessary roller coaster emotional ride that has plagued this sorry affair.