Northwest Airlines (CASE STUDY)

A Case Study Analysis of

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of M.M.S (Master of Management Studies) By Mayur Bangar Pooja Ghode Kishor Gimekar Sumedh Ingole Vrundan Shah

08 31 33 38 50

Under the guidance of: Dr. Baldev Raj

MET’s Institute of Management, Bandra Batch of 2010-2012

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CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the Case titled “Northwest Airlines And Detroit Snowstorm” is based on the study conducted by:

Mayur Bangar

08

Pooja Ghode

31

Kishor Gimekar

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Sumedh Ingole

38

Vrundan Shah

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Under my guidance and this had not formed a basis the award of any other degree of this Institute.

Place : Mumbai Date :

Faculty’s Sign

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Although five authors worked on this document, it would not have been written without support from various sources. A work is never a work of an individual. We owe a sense of gratitude to the intelligence and co-operation of those people who have been so easy to let us understand what we needed from time to time for completion of this project. We want to express our gratitude towards Dr. Baldev Raj, Services management Faculty, MET Institute of Management for giving us an opportunity to analyse this case and his patient help and guidance in the finishing stages of this work. We are highly grateful to Director Prof. Vijay Page and Course Coordinator Prof. Sangeeta Tandon for all the facilities they have provided us with. We would also to thank our families for their encouragement and support. We would also like to forward our gratitude to our friends & other faculty members who always endured us and stood by us. Last but not the least; we would like to thank each other as a team for being hard-working and sincere in our efforts towards the completion of this project.

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QUESTIONS

1. What exactly went wrong? How bad was this situation? How much of what went wrong was inconvenience, how much was safety, how much was hygiene – and how bad was each?

2. Could this situation have been avoided? If not, could it have been mitigated (and if so, how)?

3. Suggest appropriate procedures to avoid such unpleasant service encounter in future

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Q 1) What exactly went wrong? How bad was this situation? How much of what went wrong was inconvenience, how much was safety, how much was hygiene and how bad was each? Answer: What exactly went wrong: Various factors responsible are: 1. Weather Warnings 2. Ground staff not prepared for ground delays 3. Lack of communication 4. Role conflict 5. Misjudgment of safety

Weather warnings: Despite weather warnings, northwest took decision to fly whereas every other airlines discontinued their services. Just to impress customers only northwest airlines didn’t continue their services led them to crises.

Ground staff not prepared for ground delays: Due to snowstorm less ground staff was available and snow removing machines were not working. This two factors led to delays and ground staff was not exposed to such kind of delays.

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Lack of communication: There was no proper communication between Northwest Business Unit, DWA staff, Passengers and Other Competitor Airlines. Had the situation crises had been made available to Top Official there might have been immediate steps taken and the situation would not be worst.

Misjudgment of safety: NWA meteorologist issued a less severe weather forecast for DTW. SOC Director should have taken the advice of NWA’s Chief Dispatcher regarding shutdown of Detroit operations instead of reducing number of flights per bank.

How bad was this situation? The main reason for the worth situation was failure in the following area. 1. People 2. Policy 3. Process 4. Quality of service People: After the landing due to snowstorm, initially they were made to wait for 2 hrs as other Northwest jets were tying up the gates. Pilot tried to calm down the passengers by showing movies, inviting passengers to drop in for cockpit tour, allowing the usage of cell phone. Still there was discomfort among passengers As the waiting time was increasing, food and water Northwest Airlines And Detroit Snowstorm

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almost running out. People were feeling like they were in prison. Once such incidence where Sharon Friedman told that’s it hurt to deprive one child over the other as she had only 1 bottle of water remaining. After almost 6 hrs. people were getting impatient and rude and various rumors were mounting among the passengers, which led aggression and impatience among the passengers.

Policy: Due to strict Laws and Policies Cellphones, Alcohol consumption and Smoking were not allowed. But the pilot allowed the passengers to use cellphones, alcohol and smoking to keep them calm as the waiting time was increasing. You can imagine how bad was the situation since, Pilot allowed all the things which were strictly banned.

Process: There was no 1. Proper communication 2. No emergency Plan 3. No safety assessment Proper communication: There was no proper communication between Northwest Business Unit, DWA staff , Passengers and Other Competitor Airlines..Had the situation crises had been made available to Top official there might have been immediate steps taken and the situation would not be worst.

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Emergency Plan: North West Airlines had no snow emergency plan had it been the reverse case Passengers would not have face the imprison like situation. Safety Assessment: There was no proper system install to take care of the safety of passengers in terms of emergency crises so the Cabin Crew was unable to handle the safety assessment to passengers in the snowfall crises of the Airlnes.

Quality Of Service When the passengers were allowed to stay in the hotel there were no proper assistance from the Cabin Crew. Also Airlines failed to carry good enough Food and other necessary items. All these led to stock out of food and drink in the crises situation.

How much of what went wrong was

A) Inconvenience? The lack of proper process which caused poor communication and wrong decisions created a lot of inconvenience to passengers. The inconvenience caused to passengers were  After landing at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, the planes had to sit on the tarmac for as long as eight hours because other Northwest jets were tying up the gates.

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The situation was so bad that one group of passengers filed a lawsuit in Wayne County , Mich, Circuit Court against the county, the Detroit airport and Northwest , alleging that thousands of passengers were “ imprisoned” on the carrier’s planes during the storm and not allowed to disembark for hours.  The lack of contingency plan by Northwest resulted into passengers waiting for hours without food and water. The plane had a capacity of 60 gallons of potable water, however the entire potable water ran out resulting into no water left with passengers for drinking as well as use in the lavatory sinks. When the flight took off from Tampa airport, considering that the travel time was just 2 hours to Detroit, they allowed extra passengers and also removed 2 extra beverage carts and big bags of peanut packets. As a result the passengers were not left with any food at the time of emergency.  When the plane was routed to Tampa airport due to weather problems at Detroit, the passengers had to go through a lot of inconvenience, since the plane had landed late at night, check in took a long time, the buffet served to them at hotel was also bad, due to lack of communication about the exact take off time from Tampa, many passengers gathered at the airport very early in the morning. There was one passenger Mr. Post lay down on the airport floor and slept for 4 hours.

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 Many people started smoking, and the flight attendant didn’t bother to stop them, the cigarettes smell inconvenienced the passengers and the smoke caused the fire alarm to beep continuously  As the wait extended, passengers started becoming aggressive, impatient and rude. One of the passenger Mr. Pettis was trying to read Toni Morrison’s Beloved but could not concentrate. Babies were crying. The children behind him kept kicking his seat, and when he asked their mother to make them stop, she flared up. “If you move your seat up, it will stop,” she snapped.  The entire plane started stinking after few hours, the reason for this was that the toilets started overflowing, used diapers were used for babies, the clothes of the passengers had become dirty and sweaty. As the toilet was overflowed, the passengers sitting near to the toilets were inconvenienced by the bad smell. B) Safety?  The poor decision to allow the plane to take off was like ignoring the safety of passengers. Even though the weather was bad at Detroit, the Head quarters of Northwest allowed the flight to take off, compromising the safety of passengers. The attitude of the pilots was also not towards the safety of passengers, as they felt nothing unusual in flying the plane in bad weather.

 It is very dangerous to smoke inside a plane, however many passengers started smoking in the plane. This was not objected by any of the crew members. Northwest Airlines And Detroit Snowstorm

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Smoking is not only dangerous for the children inside the plane but also it may result into plane catching fire.  As mentioned earlier regarding the removal of extra food from the plane, not only caused inconvenience but also raised safety concerns as there were small babies inside the plane.  There were rumours about a baby been born on one plane; a man had died of a heart attack and on another plane, passengers had gone berserk and were tearing each other and the crew apart. All these created a panic situation among the passengers. A man in first class began hyperventilating There were at least 2 persons who required emergency treatment for diabetic shock and cardiac arrest symptoms  There was a situation where if somebody had done a panic evacuation, there would have been serious commotion among the passengers. Also if the doors were opened the temperature inside the plane would have been equalized with that of outside temperature causing serious safety hazards to passengers ,especially children as the temperature outside the plane was below 20o Celsius

 There were more safety concerns for babies as people were out of baby formula.

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C) Hygiene?

 The holding tanks for the plane’s four toilets had a total capacity of 55.5 gallons; the entire capacity was filled, resulting into toilets been overflowed. The sewage had started coming out from the door of the toilet.  People were out of baby diapers; as a result they started using used diapers causing unhygienic conditions for children and other passengers.  There were empty beer cans in the sink and the trash bins were stuffed with diapers

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Q 2) Could this situation have been avoided? If not, could it have been mitigated (and if so, how)? Answer : The Situation could have been avoided had Northwest Management and Crew took responsibility of the entire situation and proceeded with precautionary measures. Some of the measures that they could have taken to avoid such an event are as follows: 1) Bad Decision by Management: The management ordered removal of two extra beverage carts and big bags of peanut packets removed from the plane which was unnecessary as they should have accounted for delay that might arise as there was a storm at Detroit which could have and eventually caused delay in deplaning passengers. Management failed to anticipate the severity of the flight crew shortage at Detroit on Sunday; the shortage was due to various reasons such as difficulties getting to airport terminal. Failure of Systems Operation Control (SOC), An SOC director ensures SOC group acts as a coordinated team. They are responsible for monitoring and coordinating NWA’s response to schedule problems and any other potential problems. NWA’s chief dispatcher warned SOC director that the conditions were bad enough to justify NWA’s shutdown however considering that conditions were still above legal minimums the director decided to continue its Detroit operations by reducing the number of arrivals to 25 from 39 per bank. Northwest Airlines And Detroit Snowstorm

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NWA’s meteorologists issued a less severe weather forecast for DTW on Friday night, but NWA did not change its flight-thinning plan 2) Communication: A lack of clear and coordinated communications between Northwest’s operation planners in Minneapolis and northwest management in Detroit prevented the operations planners from realizing that Northwest’s Detroit terminal could not accommodate even the limited number of arrivals scheduled for Sunday. The employees were so busy fire fighting that they failed to let authorities know the overall severity and implications of the problems they faced throughout the day. How the situation could have been mitigated Even after the crisis happened there were some measures the NWA could have undertaken to lessen the impact or to mitigate the crisis. Some of the measures are discussed in the following. 1) Seeking help from other airlines: Attempts to secure unused gates of other airlines were not well coordinated, although Continental provided an unused gate to them. They could have deplaned there passengers by using mobile passenger stairs similar to what Spirit airlines did, which had similar planes as that of NWA. Even if they didn’t have a useable stairs they could have borrowed it from other airlines and deplaned there passengers. Northwest Airlines And Detroit Snowstorm

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2) Emergency Plan Northwest efforts to deplane passengers were hindered by the lack of a contingency plan for the storm’s effect on gates and taxiways. Had Northwest had a snow emergency plan for Detroit then the planners would have received more accurate assessment of that progress and would likely have implemented a more conservative Sunday arrival schedule. Northwest and the Wayne county department of Airports could have improved snow removal and aircraft positioning efforts, and thus mitigate ground delays, through formal communication channel 3) Employee Management: Similar to what Wayne County Department of Airports and other airlines serving DTW did, NWA should have booked hotels near to Airport so as to save on difficult trips to and from the airport. The employees who did manage to reach airport were not qualified to operate the types of aircraft that were scheduled to depart.

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Q 3) Suggest appropriate procedures to avoid such unpleasant service encounter in future. Procedures to avoid such unpleasant service encounter in the future are 1) Recruitment, Talent Development and empowering employees 2) Establishing guidelines and standards 3) Quick, Easy, Efficient Access and Responses 4) C&C Database Maintenance

1) Recruitment, Talent Development and empowering employees: Recruitment: Recruitment refers to the process of attracting, screening, and selecting a qualified person for a job. Retain professional recruiters or outsourcing the process to recruitment agencies. Recruitment for employees with right skills set, right attitude and right match to the teams already working. Talent Development: Training will have specific goals of improving employees' capability, capacity, and performance. It will form the core of apprenticeships and provides the backbone of content at airline. Need to continue training beyond initial qualifications is to maintain, upgrade and update skills throughout working life. Empowering employees: Empowerment refers to increasing the strength of employees in decision making. Empowerment includes the following, or similar, capabilities:

The ability to make decisions about personal/collective circumstances

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The ability to access information and resources for decision-making

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Ability to consider a range of options from which to choose (not just yes/no, either/or.)

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Ability to exercise assertiveness in collective decision making

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Increasing one's ability in discreet thinking to sort out right and wrong

The three keys that managers must use to empower their employees are: 1. share information with everyone 2. create autonomy through boundaries 3. replace the old hierarchy with self-managed teams 2) Establishing guidelines and standards To improve procedures and performance of customer service The ‘AAAA’ action plan could be used as a standard guideline as to what action the airline takes in the case of a service failure. • AAAA’ Action Plan for Service Recovery: – Anticipate – be prepared for backlash, staff ready to deal with crisis – Acknowledge – full responsibility, at time of crisis, reduces conflict – Apologize – regardless of who is at fault, must be sincere – Amends – take action, compensate appropriately

Benefits of AAAA Action Plan • Management and staff would be aware of the emergency procedure • Prepared for the unexpected - remain calm and professional • Company performance will be improved through customer satisfaction • Organised and professional approach – no loss of customers

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Management and staff would be aware of the emergency procedure - would help deal with potential conflict that can arise from unexpected crises Shows to their customers that during a crisis they have remained calm and professional and most importantly were prepared for the unexpected Achieving fairness and customer satisfaction represents a direct approach to improving company performance Management will be looked on very favourably either during or after the crisis by the customers because of their organised and professional approach – no loss of customers 3) Quick, Easy, Efficient Access and Responses Easy, Efficient Access is required for the customers to generate faith again in the airline. Access to the airports and other resources is very integral part of the airline transportation. It can be done well by prioritizing and sequencing the operations. Quick responses will be able to make the decision process faster and thus making employees as well as the customer aware of the facts going on. Thus bringing transparency in the process.

4) C&C Database Maintenance Customer & Channel database maintenance is used to keep track of their customer information and survey their customer base in order to obtain feedback. Surveys and data can be centrally located and widely accessible within a company, as opposed to being warehoused in separate departments. It encompasses collection, analysis, organizing, reporting and sharing of customer information throughout an organization. Businesses need a thorough Northwest Airlines And Detroit Snowstorm

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understanding of their customers’ needs if they are to retain and increase their customer base. Solutions will provide with the ability to deal instantly with customer issues and obtain immediate feedback. As a result, customer retention and customer satisfaction can show dramatic improvement.

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