Training for a Crisis

In a crisis, effective action is the key to a successful response.

Notice, I said effective, not rapid.

Sometimes the best reaction is no action.

On November 21, 1960, the Mercury-Redstone 1 mission was due to lift off, testing the combination of the Mercury spaceship and the Redstone rocket. The launch failed, and the rocket lifted only a few inches before settling precariously back into its cradle. NASA was left with a major problem. Enough of the launch sequence had occurred that NASA had no remote control of the rocket, which was still filled with fuel and fully pressurized. If the unsteady rocket were to fall over, the resulting explosion could cause major damage to the launch pad.

Flight Director Chris Kraft tasked the mission control team with finding a practical and safe way to place the rocket in a safe condition, but with the fuel tanks filled and pressurized, placing personnel near the rocket was a non-starter. Nobody had ever considered this scenario and the team, reacting in haste, could not come up with a viable option.

At one point, an idea was proposed to deliberately shoot the rocket, hoping to vent off the volatile fuels. Kraft vetoed this idea.

Finally, someone suggested that the rocket was resting and stable and the weather forecast indicated that there would be no high winds to cause the rocket to shift. Overnight, the vehicle batteries would die, and the fuel would slowly vent itself off, leaving the rocket safe to approach and secure.

Kraft accepted that plan, and everything unfolded as predicted.

“That’s the first rule of flight control,” Kraft said afterwards. “If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything!”

Paramedics and first responders have a similar rule. “Don’t just do something! Stand there! And get out of the way!”

In truth, this rule applies directly to all crisis management scenarios. If you don’t know what to do, any action you take has a good chance of backfiring, a scenario we’ve seen play out far too often. Crisis mismanagement can take a bad situation and make it worse. Many times, it would have been better to take no action than hastily taking the wrong one.

But there’s a problem with this approach, isn’t there? More often than not, it is our job to take action. It’s what we were hired to do. To sit there and do nothing is both practically and politically impossible. If we do nothing, the consequences will be attributed to our lack of action. Whether or not this is accurate is irrelevant; our lack of action paints a big bullseye on our back.

So, how do we resolve this problem, and more importantly, what does this have to do with training? Well, the answer to the first question is the answer to the second.

In operations, if you don’t know what to do in a crisis, then your training was inadequate. As operators, it’s not enough for us to know what to do when things are going right; we need to know what to do when things are going wrong. We need to know more than simple “When Light A turns red, open Valve 2.” We need to know what happens if Light A is supposed to turn red and doesn’t. We also need to know why Light A was supposed to turn red, what it means if it doesn’t, and the possible consequences of the failure, as well as why opening Valve 2 is the correct response.

Put simply, if acting in ignorance is bad, then our first line of defense is to eliminate our ignorance, and that means training. Operators should be familiar with more than the cookbook actions provided in most manuals; they should be familiar with design criteria as well, to understand the ‘whys’ of what they do as well as the ‘whats’. Understanding the design provides the operator with the ability to reason beyond published procedures and to develop a course of action in a crisis that eliminates ignorance. In essence, they always have at least an idea of what to do instead of operating in ignorance.

The time to make crisis decisions is before the crisis occurs. Without the stress and emotion and urgency, we can plan a response based on knowledge and clear thinking instead of being driven by exigent circumstances.

But knowledge alone is not enough in a crisis. The stress of an emergency can cause an operator to lose focus, to forget what they know. To combat that loss, operators need experience, and once again, training fills that need. OJT, casualty response drills, table top exercises, and simulations all feed into the operator’s experience, taking the knowledge that’s in their heads and moving it into their hands. The stress of the situation is lessened because the operator has been there before; it’s no longer an unknown. They have addressed the situation in practice, developed a response strategy, and can implement it.

Coming back to where we started, NASA developed a robust culture of building response scenarios to various emergencies and that paid off on April 13, 1970 when the Apollo 13 spacecraft experienced an explosion, severely damaging the craft and placing the lives of three astronauts in jeopardy. This time, Mission Control went into action immediately, diagnosing the problems and working on solutions. One such solution, using the Lunar Module as a “lifeboat” was a scenario that had been considered as very unlikely, but NASA had planned for it anyway and its implementation was a major factor in the safe return of the Apollo 13 astronauts. The extensive training of the astronauts and the ground crew, combined with hours of simulations, table top exercises, discussions, and drills gave the astronauts and their support teams the confidence to press forward, find solutions, and bring them back safely. Similarly, a robust training program will go a long way towards ensuring that when things go wrong, your operators will know what to do and when to do it.