If you think your plane might crash, Keep Calm, and see Mrs Perry

True confession time. I don’t often get blog inspiration by stories published in the Daily Mail. Last week I did. I habitually read the daily newspapers online; well at least those that are not pay walled, which is probably why I was skim reading the Daily Mail. A couple of stories caught my eye. These were stories about courage, coolness, compassion and care. The first of which was the story of Captain Eric Moody and his response, when, in 1982, all four engines of the Boeing 747 plane he was flying failed, while he was over the shark-infested waters around Jakarta, Indonesia.

Unbeknown to Captain Moody and his crew at the time, they had flown through the dust clouds thrown up by the Mount Galunggung volcano eruption earlier in the day. The dust not only damaged the windows, so the crew couldn’t see out, it also clogged up the engines, shutting them down and preventing them from being restarted. Once Captain Moody realised the engines couldn’t be restarted, he announced to the passengers, ‘this is your Captain speaking. We have a small problem and all four engines have stopped. We are all doing our damnedest to get them started again. I trust you’re not in too much distress’. Now I love flying and have travelled thousands of miles in planes. I’ve never thought about the risk of there being a mechanical fault. Likewise, I have never doubted that I wasn’t always in the safe hands of highly trained and highly regulated pilots.

I’m not sure how I would have responded to Captain Moody’s message. He was completely cool, and his announcement belied the fear and confusion on the flight deck caused by not knowing what had made the engines fail. There were 263 people onboard. Captain Moody had few options open to him to try and save as many lives as possible. He knew he could not reach the nearest airport at Jakarta, and although he considered landing in the sea, it wasn’t something he had done before.

The plane had a glide ratio of 9/1 – which meant for every mile it dropped, it would continue to glide for 9 miles. This gave them just 30 minutes to try and restart the engines or crash into the ground. The lack of engines meant the cabin could not be kept pressurised, and so passengers needed to put on the oxygen masks to breathe. Some of these failed, and Captain Moody was left with no option, but to rapidly descend thousands of feet, so that passengers could breathe without the use of oxygen masks. However, the lower altitude brought with it clearer, denser air, which blew the dust out of the plane’s engines. One by one they restarted and he was able eventually to safely land the plane.

Captain Moody died, aged 84, last month. His death prompted several stories being published last week, reminding us of his courage and coolness in what must have been an almost overwhelmingly stressful set of circumstances. The second story to catch my eye was of the compassion and care Ruth Perry showed to her pupils and their families during the long lockdowns of the Covid19 pandemic.

Readers will recall that, sadly, in 2023, Ruth Perry took her own life following an Ofsted inspection and their subsequent report. The report downgraded her primary school from its previous highest Ofsted rating to the lowest rating possible over safeguarding concerns. Ruth Perry’s death sparked an important and widespread debate about how public services should and or could be regulated. Reliance on one or two-word descriptors such as ‘requires improvement’, ‘inadequate’, or ‘good’ can never capture the whole picture of what and how an organisation provides its overall services.

The Ruth Perry story was once more in the news, as a video of Ruth talking to her pupils virtually during one of the lockdowns was played by her sister at the National Education Union’s conference last week. In the video, Ruth urges her pupils to ‘talk to the people you love, be kind to each other, be hopeful and to take care of yourselves and each other’. If you needed an example of compassion and care in action, this is a good one. You can see the video here. Have a look at the cushion behind her, it’s where this week’s blog title comes from.

Ruth’s sister urged the conference delegates to ‘get help’ and ‘think again’, if they were having thoughts about ending their lives in the same circumstances as her sister Ruth. She said ‘suicide is always a terrible, wrong-headed option. Ending her own life was the worst thing that Ruth could possibly have done’. I agree. However, I can see how some challenges in life might make one feel like that. The NHS Trust that I Chair is an organisation ‘in special measures’. At present, we are being scrutinised by every regulator possible. Last week, we were responding to four different regulators and for a moment, I felt totally overwhelmed by the scale of what it was we were being asked to respond to. It was just a moment. The moment passed and I once again became relentlessly positive. What made the difference?

Well, we had been given a very unhelpful deadline by one regulator to respond to a long list of information demands on the Thursday before Easter. Submission of our evidential response was to be by Tuesday lunchtime, the day after the Easter Bank Holiday. In response, a large number of my colleagues worked throughout the weekend; a long weekend, during which they should have enjoyed being with their families and friends, in order to deliver this information. There was no anger or resentment at the lack of any real recognition by the regulator of improvements already made. They all just adopted a professional cool, calm, compassionate and caring approach, and brought together the necessary information, and did so on time. To say I was overwhelmed by their commitment to doing what is right for our service users and their families, would simply be an understatement. It is unlikely that their efforts would ever be picked up by the Daily Mail, but acknowledging their story here is something I’m very proud to be able to do.