THE YEAR THAT

Rob Fyfe, 56, recalls the year he made a controversial but important decision

Rob Fyfe

This year started at the end of November 2008 with the crash of our Airbus at Perpignan in France, in which seven people were killed, and finished with the anniversary of the Erebus accident [a year later] and the decision to make a public apology regarding how airline had dealt with that issue.

These two things complexly consumed that year for me. It was the experience of dealing with the families and what they went thorough at Perpignan that became the motivation to say we had to be more upfront and deal with the legacy of Erebus in a more appropriate way.

My wife at the time and I had dinner with the captain’s widow, Maria Collins, and their four daughters. That was the first time, 29 and a half years after the event, that they had sat down with the CEO of Air New Zealand. You can imagine what they needed to be able to verbalise. It wasn’t directed at me, but it was directed at the airline. I listened and found it incredibly challenging. I felt a strong empathy and sense of guilt as a representative of the airline even though I hadn’t been there.

Ultimately I found it rewarding. I felt we made a difference and we helped people to … move on isn’t the right term, but to come to a different level of equilibrium with what had happened.

It wasn’t just the families and friends of the 257 people on board who were affected by that tragedy. It was the people on check-in, people on the police force and so on, who weren’t equipped to deal with it. For example, we had 18 or 19-year-old check-in agents who were taken off check-in duties to go to work in the morgue as they were bringing the remains back and to do that for three or four days and be expected to go back to work with no counselling or support.

When I first made the decision, a lot of people were anxious that we would generate a lot of emotion and not solve anything. There was resistance all the way through to board level, so it was a pretty lonely road for most of that year. I got strong support from Mike Tod, one of our senior managers, who worked closely with me on the project but I got a lot of emails from people both in the airline and outside saying: “You don’t want to do this.”

But the experience of flying with a number of those family members to Antarctica and the impact of being able to experience that journey, see that place, see the crash site on the side of the mountain — it helped people enormously.

If Perpignan hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have had any context for understanding the human emotion and the depth of that. Being at Perpignan and seeing how important it was for those families to retrieve the remains of their loved ones gives me huge empathy for the families of Pike River.

There’s a lot of talk in business circles about corporate social responsibility and so on. A lot of it ends up being a report-writing exercise. If you don’t start these processes with total transparency and honesty, you build a barrier of mistrust and from that point it’s hard to get things back on track. That’s certainly become evident in Pike River.

The experience of flying with a number of those family members to Antarctica and the impact of being able to experience that journey, see that place, see the crash site on the side of the mountain — it helped people enormously.