134 (CIRT, Dave West)

Today's SWAPA Number is 134. That's the number of cases that the Critical Incident Response Team, which we refer to as CIRT, has handled in 2024 alone.  Today we're going to talk to SWAPA CIRT Chair, Captain Dave West, about what his team does and how you might interact with CIRT during your time here at Southwest.

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Transcript

Matt McCants:

Today's SWAPA Number is 134. That's the number of cases that the Critical Incident Response Team, which we refer to as CIRT, has handled in 2024 alone. Today we're going to talk to SWAPA CIRT Chair, Captain Dave West, about what his team does, and how you might interact with CIRT during your time here at Southwest.

Mike Panebianco:

I am Mike Panabianco.

Matt McCants:

And I'm Matt McCants. And here's our interview with Dave.

Dave, maybe it'll be helpful to the membership to start out by talking about the kind of events the CIRT team gets involved in.

Dave West:

So CIRT gets involved in events that... what we call a traumatic or a critical incident. Something that would trigger maybe the fight or flight reflex. Things like aircraft accidents or incidents, say engine failures, fires, some passenger medical events, we'll call and check on those. Smoke or fumes in the cockpit, high speed rejected takeoffs, some severe turbulence, major system failures. That kind of stuff. And then what we also do as a side, call on natural disasters too. If you live in an area that's been hit by a tornado or a hurricane, earthquakes, fires, that kind of thing, we will have the team reach out and try to contact you on that to make sure you're okay.

Mike Panebianco:

Dave, let's give the listener a brief history of how CIRT got started, and how CIRT has evolved over the years.

Dave West:

CIRT was started by a fireman who realized that they had no outlet or no way to talk about these events. And it was causing problems, say almost like a PTSD type symptoms. And it was something that he went back and got a PhD, and he and another mental health professional came up with this process that we call CISM, or it's Critical Incident Stress Management. That was the genesis of what we do today. It was brought to aviation by Mimi Tompkins. And for you that aren't familiar with Mimi, she was the first officer on that Aloha Flight 243 where the top blew off, and they lost a flight attendant. She realized that there was nobody for them to talk to really about what had happened.

And so she's the one who's credited with bringing it to aviation. And over the years it's just evolved to where every major airline now has a CIRT team, or others call it CIRP, C-I-R-P. But they're scattered pretty broadly around the world now. I think that the team at SWAPA, I think it was started 1996. And it's been brought up to where we are now, and we have a team of 33 really big-hearted caring individuals who are mostly volunteers, who were trained in peer support, and call and check on you after a major event. And mostly we're just calling, it's a confidential call, but we're just calling to check on your well-being, and make sure you're thinking of everything that's being asked of you at the time.

Mike Panebianco:

I've experienced that phone call myself, and it actually caught me off guard. We had an incident, an in-flight incident, and a divert, and we're sitting in the flight deck after we got to the gate, and we were kind of, "How do we get another airplane, get on our way?" And then back then it was SISM, but a CIRT member called us and they were like, "Yeah, no, we're going to get you pulled, because you don't need to be out there actually operating an airplane, because you'll be thinking about the last incident, and not focusing on what you're doing in front of us." That leads to an interesting question though. You handle quite the broad spectrum of cases. And I've heard the term special services used and you didn't really put your finger on some of the more extreme things that you deal with. What is special services, and give the listener a little bit of an insight into that end of what the CIRT team provides.

Dave West:

Well, the special services is... that was set up for a team that's specially trained to help in the event of a pilot death, or somebody in the immediate family. They're trained to go and help the family, the pilot, whoever the survivors are of this, to help them with as much as even planning the funeral, to doing nothing more than just providing resources for them. It really depends on just what they need and what they request, but that's what special services is. That falls mostly under the LIFT program, but there are times when CIRT would get involved, like on a, say a suicide or something like that, where there's a lot of trauma. And we would step in and help with those events.

Matt McCants:

Now Dave, along with special services, you mentioned Project LIFT. How does, what CIRT does tie in with Project LIFT, and how do you two entities work together?

Dave West:

So originally everything was under, it used to be the CISM team, and that was the umbrella for everything. LIFT was created in about 2014, because we were realizing that there were pilots out there who needed more on the counseling side. So we started that for, say, anxiety, depression, some of those things, counseling safe ways for pilots to get counseling without jeopardizing their medicals. With CIRT, we work mostly with a short term issue. If you've had an instant or whatever, we're going to step in work with you. It's going to be maybe a day or two. Most of the things are over by then. If it turns into a long-term issue or if you say you need counseling, marital counseling, family counseling, if you feel like you're having maybe some anxiety or depression issues, LIFT was designed for that kind of thing, for more of a long-term type care with mental health.

And that's kind of where the separation is. Another way to look at, it's mostly probably operational events, things that happen at work, whether it's something that happens on the plane or something like that. And now with that caveat, I would say that the other thing that CIRT would work on, is, say you're driving home from a trip and you have an auto accident, and there's significant injury, deaths, that kind of stuff. Then CIRT is there to help you with that kind of stuff. General aviation, aircraft accidents, anything like that, any kind of trauma, mall shootings. All the stuff we're seeing these days with the civil unrest, we're there to help you with any of that.

Mike Panebianco:

So this is kind of a two-way street. Dave, this sounds like you monitor, and I know we have the emergency notification system. If something happens with an aircraft, you have an incident, CIRT's notified about that. But it sounds to me like you can also get a call from a member that this is actually a service that members can engage themselves to reach out and say, "Hey, I was driving home late last night. I rolled up on an accident, and it was horrific. I'm not even sure how to process this, can you help me get into my benefits or whatever I need to do to start moving through this incident?"

Dave West:

Absolutely, yeah. Do that. Another one that we occasionally get, is crew van accidents. That kind of stuff. We will call and check on people after that. There's been a host of things that... You know? People witnessing shootings in a crew van, and like I say, the accidents, that kind of stuff. Yeah, we're there for all of that. I would say that we can only respond to the things we know about. And a lot of those things don't come out. We might get a call from a chief pilot on call or from one of the chiefs or somebody, and sometimes the flight attendants will call/ but I would say for our pilots, if you witness something like that or need something, call, SWAPA, call the hotline.

There's a CIRT hotline, where we're right there on the front of the SWAPA a page. Once you log in, you can call the front desk, they can connect you to us, or you can go to the CIRT page on the website, and it has all of our members listed too. And there's a chance that you might know somebody, and you can call them directly. Don't not call. Just reach out to somebody because we're there to help you. And it's a confidential call. We don't share that information.

Matt McCants:

Dave, you mentioned confidentiality there. One of the things that pilots are hesitant about is revealing information to anybody and everybody. So how does CIRT and these other groups that you work with, protect that confidentiality?

Dave West:

So yeah, we do work with confidentiality. And we've all signed NDAs, so whatever you tell us is going to be confidential. Having said that, we do have a pilot services group that's going to be... It has the HIMS committee in there, CIRT LIFT, benefits, legal. And we share information across that only to the point to how best to help a pilot who might be having an issue or a problem. How best do we help them with their benefits or whatever. Everything's not just open and posted for everybody to see. It's very confidential.

Mike Panebianco:

Dave, does the company have a role in CIRT? How do they work with you or support you, or what role do they play when one of these incidents happens?

Dave West:

The company has been very supportive of us, in that they support us financially, they give us information. And I will say that it's a one-way street when they give us information. They can tell us about something and we will call and check, but we don't report back to them. It's not a two-Way street. It's strictly a one-way street, with them giving us information, and it stays with us. One of the things too, that we work with the company in that they have the emergency response plan. So if there is a major aircraft accident or incident, the CIRT team is who goes, we're on the GO-Jet, and we're going to wherever that accident is. We're there for the SWAPA members there, the pilots, and not just the ones that were involved, but it's going to be everybody who's there, whether it's the safety committee, the GO-Team, everybody who's the pilot is going to get touched by us on something like that.

But the company's very supportive of that. And I think at the end of the day, we all want the same thing, is to help a pilot who's been involved in a traumatic event like that, just to help them get better and get back on the line. But it's one of those things where again, they give us information and we don't send anything back to them. Once it comes to us, it stays with us. So that's kind of how we protect the confidentiality. One thing I'd say too is that these teams have to be a union team. It can't come from the company. Because when I call and check on somebody after an event, you can tell me anything. I'm not there to critique you. All I do is listen, and then I'm going to give you some education on physiologically what happened to you, how to best deal with it.

And there won't be any reporting back. I don't report back to SWAPA, I don't report to the company. And so you can tell me anything. My goal is just to help you process what's happened, and when the time is right, get back to work. So if the company is involved on that, then it's no longer the safe conversation anymore like that. So if you said something, we really messed that up, we didn't run the checklist, we didn't do this, we didn't do that. With me, that's not my job, that's not my function. That's not the CIRT team's role. Somebody else will talk to you about that. But if the company was involved and you said something like that, now they're obligated to do something about it. With a CIRT team, we're just there to take care of you.

Matt McCants:

That's all really good to know. And you mentioned Chief Pilots and the NOC chief earlier. Can you talk a little bit more about what that relationship is like?

Dave West:

It's really a good relationship, and we encourage our team members to go in to their domicile chiefs and talk to them and get to know them. A lot of times a pilot will call the office with a problem and they don't know what to do with it, and we're there to kind of take it off their plate and to help you. And once we take it again, again, we don't report back to them. And then certain events, the NOC will call us and say, "Hey, this has happened. We're just giving you heads up, if you'd like to contact the crew." And of course we do.

And even after that, there's been events in the past where the crew is sequestered, they're waiting for drug testing, whatever. And sometimes that can be a fairly lengthy process. And if we don't have anybody immediately on site, I'll call the NOC chief and say, "Hey, can we have some food delivered? Can we get water brought to them? Can we take care of their physiological needs while they're waiting for this drug test and whatever, before it's decided what's going to happen with them, if they're going to stay at this hotel, this hotel, whatever." That kind of the ways we get involved with the NOC chiefs.

Mike Panebianco:

Let's get into the meat of a case. Give us a walkthrough of a hypothetical case. I don't want to highlight anybody or anything like that, but let's talk through a case so that our listener, members, can see where the CIRT team adds value to their careers, and how they might encounter you. How would you even hear from CIRT?

Dave West:

So a lot of those come from ENSs. And those will come out as very generic. If you don't know what an ENS is, it comes out from dispatch. They're called Emergency Notification Systems, and it goes to the chief pilots, it goes to execs, it comes to the safety committee our committee gets them and it just talks about everything that's happening with the operation. Occasionally when they come out, they'll come out as maintenance or whatever, and it might just say a maintenance divert. And that usually triggers us, then we'll call and check on you. So I have permission to talk about this one. Some guys were flying around northern Florida, 33,000 feet. The cabin starts filling up with smoke. They dive down between two thunderstorms, get it on the ground. When something like that happens, as pilots, we're trained to kind of start dealing with the situation. We kind of shove everything into a box and compartmentalize.

All we're thinking about is just getting the plane on the ground and safety at that point. Once you get on the ground, it takes a little bit. When you've had an event like that, the fight or flight reflex kicks in, you get that adrenaline dump, you get cortisol, you got all these things that your body's programmed to do to help you just deal with the event. When you get on the ground, we're going to call you, and 99% of the time we call, and the first thing we hear is, "We're good, everything's good." And what we try to do is get you to slow down, talk about it, tell me what happened. And again, it's a non-judgmental thing. I don't care if you did the checklist, I don't care what you did, didn't do. I want you to talk about it. And the reason is, is that on a traumatic event, if you can get somebody to talk about it and tell you what happened, it helps the brain process it. And it moves up from the short-term memory into long-term memory.

If you try to suppress it, then that's when you're going to have problems down the road, not being able to sleep at night, you just keep playing it over and over in your mind. It just becomes more like a PTSD type thing. Our goal is to try to head these things off, before it gets to that level. So we're just going to call you, we're going to talk to you, let you tell your story, ask questions. And the questions we try to ask is to draw in the senses. What did you see, what did you hear, what did you smell? Those things help you relive and process the event. Again, I don't really care what your answers are, I just want you to talk about it, because that's going to help you process it in your mind and move it to long-term memory. It's not like you forget about it, but it won't be an issue for you.

And so that's the kind of things we're doing there. And then we're going to give you some information on stress and the best way to deal with it. So when you've had that adrenaline dump, after an hour or two, that stuff's going to start wearing off, and you're going to more than likely feel bad, headaches, could cause upset stomach type things. At the time, you still feel good because you're drugged up on these natural chemicals. But what you got to think about is that once they get you a new airplane, an hour or two later, the company is just trying to keep the airline flowing, everything going, getting past point A to B. And if you say you're good, they're going to plug you right back in into a seat and try to get you going.

But what you got to think about is, "I might feel good right now, but am I going to feel good in an hour or two when this starts happening?" And then if I have an event, say I lose an engine on takeoff, am I going to be 100% on that flight, or am I going to be thinking about what just happened an hour or two earlier? And so we really encourage you to self-evaluate and determine if you're going to be good to go for this next flight. And if you're not, say something, tell the NOC chief, tell scheduling, tell somebody. But for heaven's sakes, don't go jump in a plane and get ready to go if you're not ready to go. Don't sign that 117 form. Because once you've signed that, you're saying that you're 100%, you're ready to go. And if something happens, then you can't go back and say, "Well, I was just dealing with this, this has just happened." They're going to say, "You shouldn't have signed that form."

Mike Panebianco:

Dave, of all the cases that you work and you talk to pilots after an in-flight incident, a lot of us think we're good to go, what's the percentage of pilots who think they're good to go at the time in the aftermath of an incident? How many of them do you think flip over and become aware that they're probably not in the shape to fly, after the adrenaline wears off and that parasympathetic backlash happens?

Dave West:

Probably the majority. I mean, something like that happens, again, you're amped up, you've got all this adrenaline. One of the things too... So if you've had something like that happen to you, when you get on the ground and when it starts slowing down, you notice that it's like your hands don't work, you can't write. I had an event one time I was trying to write in the log book, and it looked like a five-year-old with a crayon. And it was like, "What is going on?" Or your leg won't stop shaking, or you just can't seem to kind collect your thoughts. You think you're good, you feel good, whatever. But really what has happened is you've shoved everything into a box, and it hadn't started coming out yet. As that starts wearing off, again, you start unpacking that and the adrenaline starts wearing off, and then it kind of starts crashing down on you.

It's kind of like if you've had too much coffee and you're starting to come down off that caffeine high, but times 10. So the majority of the time we will call somebody. And like I say, first response is, "I'm good. Oh yeah, no, everything's fine." And if we can get them to slow down and talk, usually by the end of a 20 or 30 minute conversation, they're like, "Oh, wow." I think this hit me a lot harder than I realized. And I don't think I am good to go right now. And so there is a flip there.

A lot of it depends too, just kind of what your experience level is. Some people, they're more resilient. Things happen, and they process it and move right on. Maybe they had more exposure to something in a previous life or whatever. And then some of us, your stress bucket might be full, and this is the scoop that just overflows the bucket. And you need to go empty your bucket. There's a whole myriad of things that could be going on there. But again, usually you can't self diagnose this, it's one of those things where you need to talk to somebody who has a little experience, and can guide you through this with a helping conversation. Just come along as peer support.

Matt McCants:

Dave, you mentioned one of the things that you hear from pilots a lot of times after an event like this, is, "I'm good, and we're all set." Well, what are some of the effects of an event like this on a pilot on the next leg, and the next leg after that? And what are some of the concerns that you have, having seen a lot of these events?

Dave West:

So you think you're good, and one of the things that we do, and it's human nature, but after something happens, an hour or two later, say, you do go take this next flight, and you're going to be sitting there and you're thinking about, "Wow, I should have done this, or I should have done this." You're going to be second guessing yourself. And before you know it, really all you're thinking about is what happened earlier. And that's a natural thing to do. I think one of the dangers of immediately jumping in a plane and going somewhere after you've experienced a traumatic event, is that, where is your mind? What's your mindset at that point? And if something else happens, are you going to be 100% in the game, ready to go?

One of the things that over the years that working with the NOC and the chiefs there, that there's nothing written, but it's one of those that if you've had an engine failure or you've had smoke or fumes, if you've had to put on the oxygen mask, they pretty much just pull you at that. They don't really give you the option to continue flying. And they've come to realize that it's a liability for them too if they immediately throw you into a plane and send you on your way, and then something happens, we're all standing there talking to the FAA and the NTSB and saying, "Well, yeah, maybe in hindsight that wasn't such a good idea." So there's a lot of things now that kind of... what are considered a traumatic event like that, that you're automatically just going to be sent to the hotel or sent home, depending on what it was and where it happened.

Mike Panebianco:

Dave, you did mention earlier that CIRT doesn't just handle at work incidents. What wider band of incidents are you interested in hearing from pilots on?

Dave West:

So we're interested in anything that affects your life. Whether it happened at work or at home, car accidents. Even if it's something minor, you can always reach out to us. We're available for any of that. Anything that's going to affect your life like that, we're there to help you. And if it's not a CIRT function, I'm going to get you to the right person, whether it's benefits, whether it's LIFT, whether it's any of our other teams that are set up to help. But we're all there just to help you as a pilot.

Matt McCants:

So Dave, let's role play here. I'm a pilot, I was just involved in an aircraft incident. My head's swimming a little bit, I'm getting phone calls from anybody and everybody of all these groups that we just talked about. It's a lot. And then I get a random call from either you or one of your many volunteers. What should I just be expected to talk about with you?

Dave West:

So when we call, we're basically just calling as a service to check on your wellness and your safety. We'll ask you to kind just tell us what happened. And we're just going to help you put it all together. We're not there to analyze you, anything like that. It's more just a wellness call. And really all we're doing is trying to help you put the pieces together to self-evaluate and determine whether you're ready to go for the next flight, or if you need to pull the safety chain on this and say, "No, I'm not good, I'm not ready to go, and I need some time." Think of us as just another pilot, sitting down in a restaurant, a bar, whatever, just having a beer, and just two of us talking. Because that's really all it is. We're just two pilots talking about what's happened. We understand what happens daily. We're all line pilots, so we know what happens out there. And we're just here to help you process it.

Matt McCants:

And let's say an hour goes by, and now I'm waiting on that next aircraft that I'm going to operate, and some of those physiological things that you talked about earlier, they start sinking in. I start second guessing myself, maybe I'm not as good as I said I was earlier. Is it okay to call you guys back?

Dave West:

Absolutely. That's something normal that happens with all of us, and it's to be expected. And if it does, just call us back anytime. And we will probably be checking back with you in the next day or so. And just in, "How are you doing, did you sleep last night? How's it going? Do you need anything from us?" Again, we're just there for you, and you're always welcome to call, that invitation's there. And we tell you that when we hang up with you, that something comes up, just give us a call. And oddly enough, I'll have people call me several years later that something's happened, and will run something by me. And that's what we're here for.

Mike Panebianco:

We want to thank Dave for coming on the podcast to talk to us about SWAPA's Critical Incident Response Team.

Matt McCants:

If you have any feedback for us at all, please drop us a line at comm@swapa.org. We really do want to hear from you.

Mike Panebianco:

And finally, today's bonus number is 214-722-4248. That's their number, and you can find it on the SWAPA website, as well as the SWAPA app.