FAM Team

By Justin

I am going to admit that I don’t know anything about the game called ‘Fam’. My guy friends play this game in which you say the word fam. There are rules and I just don’t know them. There is a history, I don’t understand. I honestly don’t know the first thing about it, except to say fam.

The word fam occurs a lot in my life. In fact, at work I have joined a FAM team. This team responds to any accidents involving planes. My role on the Family Notification Team, FAM for short, is to call the next of kin for passengers and notify them of an accident and gather some information. It is a high stress but very necessary part of disaster planning.

Yesterday we had a full scale drill. At 9:15am a Southwest plane hit an F-16 on landing in Tulsa, OK. In the drill we had 100 people on board the plane plus crew. I received my notification of activation at 9:45am. It was a nerve racking day. I made actual calls during the drill to actors playing family members. I was assigned to crew to start the day and my first call was to the wife of the pilot to notify her that her husband was injured and transported to a hospital. She was already onsite in Tulsa. I could hear over her cell phone the sirens and people in the background. As the day went on it became easier to pick up the phone and call to check on the family members.

It brought to life, somewhat, what a real activation will be like. At Southwest we don’t assume it won’t happen and we don’t act like it won’t. We talk and live like it is going to happen today and are prepared if it does. As they like to say in training, we are the safest airline in the world, flying the most flights per day. That is where you want to be, but we have to be prepared for the inevitable.

For future reference, if you ever hear of a Southwest incident, don’t call me call Holly. I'll already be on the phone.

Oh and

FAM (whatever that means)