Airbus Puts American Airlines On Blast For Losing Their Luggage, Then Claims To Be Hacked

Aircraft manufacturer Airbus tweeted on Wednesday evening that American Airlines lost their luggage. Someone had flown into Washington, D.C. where Airbus has its headquarters, and the airline failed to deliver their bags – or to send the bags out to the customer when they said to expect them.

This was… awkward. American Airlines is the largest operator of Airbus aircraft, even after having retired their Airbus widebodies and opting against completing their order of A350s. Of course American Airlines might have been delaying Airbus luggage on purpose as a passive aggressive response to delays of the Airbus A321XLR now expected for delivery next year.

My assumption at the time of the tweet was that an Airbus employee responsible for their twitter account had forgotten to change profiles before tweeting. But Airbus decided to explain it away as a hack and then doubled down.

Inadvisable tweets are often initially blamed on hacks, and it is often not actually a hack. So I have to wonder if they took the Shaggy Defense to its logical conclusion and contacted the FBI?

When disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner first publicly tweeted an inappropriate photo to a college student he claimed his account was hacked. And this story was extra funny because his name is Weiner. But he refused to say the picture wasn’t of him, or that there weren’t any such photos floating around.

The better approach is to get someone to actually fall on their sword for a bad tweet, like Ted Cruz blaming an intern for liking a tweet about porn star Cory Chase from the account @SexuallPosts on the anniversary of 9/11.

American Airlines will probably be forgiving, shortly after the US Airways merger the team still managing the US Airways Twitter account accidentally responded to a customer with a pornographic image of a woman with a model of a Boeing 777.

(HT: @RossFeinstein)

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Pretty funny and yes, I’d bet the farm that the Airbus social media person forgot to change profiles on her (or his) app before firing that off. And now it’s because they “were hacked”. I can smell that bullplop from here. Anyhow, AA’s baggage losing record is almost as annoying as their penchant for rolling (and rolling and rolling….) delays.

  2. I will keep their luggage until I get my planes. . Boeing better watch out. . .LOL

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