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Alan Price Luncheon

Alan Price, Chief Pilot for Delta Airlines during 9-11 Speaks at February Luncheon

Our guest speaker at the Chapter February luncheon was Alan W. Price. Alan was the Chief Pilot for Delta Airlines in Atlanta when the terrorist attacks of 9-11-2001 occurred. As such, he had over 3,300 pilots under his direct supervision and “had the con” on that fateful day.

When discussing the events of that day with those in attendance, he focused on what he termed “crisis leadership”. Crisis leadership, Alan said, requires the development and application of three main characteristics in a leader.

First, is to have a proper perspective. This means to stay in touch with the reality of your situation. Objectivity in the evaluation of the situation is of the utmost. Strive not to get out of touch with reality.

Second is to expect the unexpected. In order to do that you need to understand the pie chart of your knowledge of a situation. The first slice is “what you know”. The second slice is “what you know that you don’t know”. The third, and largest, slice is “what you don’t know that you don’t know”. Alan called this third slice the “red zone”. The trick to this second characteristic is to both understand and stay out of the red zone.

Third, is to be critical, but not self-critical. Alan said that bad things will happen in your life. Most people learn from even their bad experiences, but successful people and successful leaders learn the “right lesson”. Don’t beat yourself up with negative criticism of a bad situation. Instead, be critical of the situation itself by analyzing it and learning the right lessons from it so you can apply them in the future.

When it became clear on 9-11 that the twin towers had been attacked by terrorist and had not been caused by an accident, Alan said that the decision was immediately made to ground all Delta flights. This was a “principle value” decision that was the only correct action for the situation. Though the impact of grounding all flights for a day was around a fifty million dollar loss, it never entered into the decision.

Alan next mentioned what he called the “law of unintended consequences”, which states that every time you solve a problem you can unintentionally create another one!

During a crisis, he said, the primary crisis objective is “communicate, communicate, communicate!” This applies even if you only have partial information at the moment. You can fill in the missing pieces as you get them. Some information is better than none.

Alan closed by showing two Mandarin Chinese symbols on a sheet of paper. They stood for “dangerous opportunity” the Chinese equivalent of crisis!

Many thanks to Alan for sharing his personal experiences with us. For more info on Alan, click:

Alan Price

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Alan starts his presentation.

Chapter President Steve Frederick '72, thanks Alan for visiting with us.