Interview with Philipp Perren

swissVR Monitor: You are President of the Board of companies that provide rescue and transport missions in emergency situations. What do you see as the critical factors in successfully operating in this context?

Philipp Perren: Ensuring success in operations of this kind requires various external and internal factors to come together. Emergency missions are usually time-critical. As far as the external factors are concerned, the crucial elements are the way emergency calls are made and which organisation is providing the rescue. Everyone should know the emergency ambulance number: that number is 144 right across Switzerland, although ambulance control centres are administered at canton level. The control centre must be easy to contact, it needs to be able to understand the language of the person making the emergency call, it must be able to provide all the resources needed, it must know where these resources currently are, and it must be able to coordinate them. In the case of accidents in the mountains, for example, this means not just a helicopter with a doctor on board but also a mountain rescue team and perhaps other professionals too. But it’s not enough for the control centre just to deploy helicopters, it also has to deploy ambulances, as both are needed in many cases, or else an ambulance may be the first choice because of access factors or weather conditions. Valais and the cantons covered by the Zurich search and rescue service control centre are well placed, because the 144 control centres provide all the resources from one place. Other cantons route emergency calls to the 1414 service rather than operating rescue flights themselves.

Then there are the internal factors. A company needs to be organised appropriately, with resources and people on standby who are appropriately trained and equipped. And that training needs to be topped up on a regular basis.

Before you read on, take a moment to consider a couple of questions. How many full-time equivalent (FTE) professionals do you think are needed for one rescue helicopter to be available on standby 24/7? And would you like to guess how many rescue missions a crew flies each year with a winch or a ‘long line’?

A standby helicopter always has a crew of at least three: a pilot, a doctor and a rescue paramedic who operates the winch. Experience shows that providing a 24/7 service actually requires around 5.5 FTEs for each shift – that’s more than 16 individuals for just one rescue helicopter!

Each one of these people needs regular training – and not just in the classroom or as part of drills but on the job. Here, too, we are in an extremely good position with the air rescue companies also working in the commercial sector. Each of our rescue crews makes between 5,000 and 8,000 flights a year with an external load that has to be picked up very accurately at the point of departure and dropped off very accurately at its destination or else may need to be mounted somewhere. This work is crucial to the individual crews having the optimal preparation for the 100-200 winch rescue missions they fly each year.

swissVR Monitor: What lessons can emergency response operations teach us about the work of a Board of Directors?

Philipp Perren: An emergency response can’t be planned – by definition, you can’t plan for when it will come. But you can plan in organisational terms, ensuring the right staff are available, the resources are optimal, and there is regular training – on the job where possible. Above all, though, each unplanned mission needs to be followed by a debriefing, so that the crews are even better prepared for the next unplanned mission.

The work of a Board can’t always be planned either, and emergencies arise quite often. I think the main lesson from emergency responses for Board members would be that although you cannot plan for emergencies, you can equip yourself and prepare as well as possible for the unforeseen. You can do this by appropriate planning and organisation but also through regular debriefing of the Board by the executives. My experience in the emergency response sector has taught me that a strict demarcation between the operational level and strategic leadership is very often the wrong approach. We need to ensure knowledge and lessons learned are shared between these levels, but it is also important to pass on experience of new and unexpected challenges and events. To put it another way, as I’ve already commented, a resilient organisation has to be able not just to respond when a crisis arises, but also to anticipate risks and crises.

swissVR Monitor: Our survey of Board members shows that only a minority of Boards have rehearsed their crisis management for critical events, such as accidents. What are the key crisis events that Boards need to be ready for in 2025, regardless of the sector in which they operate?

Philipp Perren: All companies in the aviation sector must have a written Emergency Response Plan, which is scrutinised and, sometimes, criticised or added to by the supervisory authority. Something similar would be sensible in any company – and it should be the Board that produces it. A company’s emergency response plan should be as open as possible in terms of the critical events it covers, wide-ranging and general in scope, but it also needs to be detailed in terms of reactiveness and the people and agencies to be informed and involved.

swissVR Monitor: What specific measures do you recommend Boards take to rehearse for crisis situations of this kind?

Philipp Perren: You can’t really rehearse for something that is unpredictable because it wouldn’t then be unpredictable. Rehearsing crisis situations is probably most easily achieved through some kind of simulation – a sort of ‘moot court’ involving part of the Board and/or the management team coming up with a specific crisis scenario and the rest having to react in practical terms and take measures even as the initial crisis develops and escalates.

swissVR Monitor: Which parameters should the Board measure and document when rehearsing crisis management, for example reaction time?
Philipp Perren: You can only measure hard facts, but most crises comprise lots of different soft facts. When you are rehearsing crisis management you can only measure the few hard facts you have; the rest is open to qualitative assessment. And here, too, I would recommend involving every level of the company right down to customer-facing colleagues. A critical evaluation or assessment of every element of the crisis response, where possible, will provide more information about the quality of crisis management even where soft facts dominate.