Evaluating airline crisis management performance: The cases of flights GE222 and GE235 crash accidents

Effective crisis management is of utmost importance for an airline to restore its safety reputation after a crash accident. Motivated by two consecutive crash accidents by the same airline, this paper proposes an importance-based method to evaluate the airline's performance as a means of identifying areas that can best improve its capabilities for effective crisis management. A four-dimensional framework with 31 attributes is identified to represent an airline's capabilities for achieving effective crisis management. Based on expert surveys, a revised importance-performance analysis method and an importance-weighted priority ranking method are used to evaluate the case airline's crisis management capabilities and identify the ways by which its future crisis management performance can be best improved. The evaluation results highlight the significant role played by the attribute importance and the need for the case airline to direct more overall improvement efforts to the organizational aspects of its crisis management practices. This paper makes conceptual and methodological contributions to crisis management research and provides useful insights into effective airline crisis management for the airline industry.