Capt. Alan Price took the job of chief pilot for Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines just 42 days before the attacks on Sept. 11, a turning point for the country as well as Price’s industry.
Recalling the tense morning and days following 9/11, Price told attendees of the Georgia Economic Developers Association conference Friday that he learned the most about leadership from those moments of crisis.
“You can’t lead from fear ... as we were afraid for what had happened, we had to look to the future and decide how it was we were going to go forward,” said Price.
After the first plane hit the World Trade Center, he said, Delta’s executive leadership assembled at its Operations Control Center in Atlanta and made a critical decision to land all of its planes, even as most were still airborne.
“You need to know there was no plan to ground Delta Airlines. We didn’t have a plan. It had never happened before, so we were in uncharted territory,” said Price. “This happened some moments before the FAA decided the same thing and ordered the airlines to ground themselves; Delta made that decision independently.”
After they got all planes on the ground, he said, they started doing inspections in the following days and found two box cutters, weapons used by some of the hijackers, in the seatback pockets on two of their planes.
Without knowing for sure whether grounding all their planes prevented further attacks, Price said Delta’s core value of safety made the decision the right one for the company — even as the cost of not operating added up to about $40 million a day.
The day after the 9/11, he said, he decided to walk around the empty Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to try to begin to come up with ideas for moving forward.
“It was a ghost town, and there I was walking amongst these aluminum giants on the concourses, and I was the only human being out there,” said Price. “I started thinking, ‘What are we going to do to get this airline back in the air?’”
He said communication was key to re-establishing connections with the pilots and other Delta team members to keep everyone informed.
“We’ve got to share what we know with them and then find out what they know and tell it back to senior management and create a two-way dialogue,” said Price. “And in doing that, we begin to put the team back together.”
Price was the keynote speaker for the GEDA conference, which drew 700 attendees this week to downtown Savannah. The pilot retired from Delta in 2004 and now runs a leadership consulting practice.
He told the crowd the three essentials to good leadership are having defined core values, anticipating the unexpected (to the extent one can) and being able to take criticism in order to improve. Price said principled-based decision making comes down to facing crises head on.
Referencing other major crises in the last decade, such as Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Price said it is always better to do something than nothing.
“If we look at problems we have, crises, as opportunities and not problems, it changes the world,” said Price. “On the morning of September 11, our whole world changed — for you and me and certainly for the airline industry. ...We needed to realize this was an opportunity, not a problem, and from that moment forward, all things become simpler.”