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Kenyon International Emergency Services

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Kenyon Supports Comair Training at Johannesburg International Airport

Kenyon's CEO Simon Hardern and Associate Ultan Kenny delivered a two-day crisis management training programme for South African airline Comair. The programme exercised the leadership team in responding to an accident and covered the role of an Airline Response (Go) Team, activation procedures and lessons from recent Kenyon activations. Kenyon's view is that staff not involved in crisis work daily must be specially trained.

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A training session in a meeting room, with a presenter standing at a screen and attendees seated around a table

Kenyon's operational experience of managing complex international crises has been channelled into developing a programme of consultancy training for Emergency Response and Crisis Management. Kenyon can provide training, planning, exercises and audits in most of the world’s countries/industries and in many different languages.

Why crisis roles need dedicated training

Our philosophy is simple. If your employees are not involved day-to-day in Crisis Management activities, then they need to be specially trained and prepared for these duties. Without preparation, you cannot expect your employees to be able to professionally respond and operate in a crisis situation.

Exercising Comair's leadership team and Go Team

We put this into practice this past week with a valued Client from South Africa, Comair. Kenyon’s CEO, Simon Hardern, and Associate Ultan Kenny supported a two-day programme that included exercising the leadership team in a response to an accident. Ultan also covered what an Airline Response (Go) Team should do.

What an Airline Response (Go) Team does

The ability of a company to project its command and control systems forward to the region impacted by an incident, will have a direct influence on the success of the recovery operation. The composition of Specialist Teams employed by a company will vary according to the circumstances of the incident.

Teams will likely include personnel dedicated to: investigation; communications; humanitarian support; government affairs; and also a ‘core’ team to manage multiple deployed functions.

Collectively called the ‘Go Team’, these teams constitute the reinforcement for existing local resources, the protectors of company reputation and the eyes, ears and ambassadors for the company headquarters.

This course prepared the Go Team for deployment, bolstering their confidence. Simon also covered activation procedures, as well as talking airline employees through some of Kenyon’s most recent activations which always offers an interesting oversight of reality versus a checklist response.

More from Kenyon

  • When a Crisis Is Already Public: Putting Families First

    News of a major incident can travel the world in minutes, often before the organisation involved knows who is affected. Organisations can no longer assume they will tell families first that an incident has happened, but they can become a trusted source quickly while ensuring verified personal information reaches families before it is released publicly: fast about the event, careful about the facts and families-first with personal information.

  • The Capability Gaps We See Most Often: Why Compliance Is Not the Same as Competence

    A plan that is written, maintained and reviewed shows an organisation has the required arrangements in place, but not how they will perform on the day. Kenyon sets out the difference between compliance and competence, the capability gaps that surface most often in exercises, why capability erodes even when the plan does not change, and why closing an action is not the same as closing a gap.

  • Crisis Stakeholder Coordination: When No One Is in Command

    No organisation commands a major incident. Investigators, regulators, police and government each hold part of the response, while government affairs, communications, legal, operations and family assistance must decide together in real time. The article explains why those functions have to operate as one, how coordination with external authorities works, why the host community is the stakeholder that endures longest, and the three things to do before an incident.