The collision of an American Eagle jet and a Black Hawk helicopter was horrible. The only good that will come out of it is that we’ll learn enough about the incident to make the perfect storm of events that caused it much less likely to repeat.
Airlines have contingency plans for situations like this. American Airlines hasn’t experienced anything like flight 5342 in 23 years, but they update plans and train for it.
For instance, the Care Team at the airline was activated. Anyone in the company can volunteer to be a part of it – except for pilots and mechanics – and they’re on standby in the event of a disaster. They have a credit card and each person is assigned to a family member or survivor, and they stay until they aren’t needed any longer. These volunteers were contacted Wednesday night and told to go to the airport (some went to D.C., others to Wichita).
One of the elements to crisis response you might not have thought of is that American Airlines has paused marketing its credit card onboard flights.
The airline surely doesn’t want to appear tone deaf, or appearing insufficiently somber. And I guess someone somewhere could be offended by promoting travel. At the same time, it is literally people who are traveling that would hear the message so they are the least likely to be offended.
And American continues to sell tickets, and miles and Citi and Barclays continue to take card applications (and these are still promoted on the AA.com site).
Still, it’s appropriate to take a conservative approach here – there’s more downside in getting this wrong than there is upside to promoting cards on board for a short period of time. At the same time, onboard card applications help support flight attendant incomes and they aren’t being made whole for the lost opportunity.
Overall, the airline’s response to the Day After the tragic collision has been well-executed. Employees that met with CEO Robert Isom in D.C. appreciated his presence. And, unlike so many others, his remarks haven’t veered off into inappropriate speculation or blame-shifting.
I feel for every pilot, flight attendant, gate agent, ground crew, air traffic controller, FAA inspector, NTSB agent, even call center folks—these are tough times. Wishing you guys a lot of strength and perseverance in these coming days. We’re with you and we’ll keep flying, too. Thank you.
Makes sense. A lot of nervous flyers today, my wife arrived to the airport early and was hoping to take the earlier standby flight to ORD from LGA.
The system wouldn’t allow the GA to add her to the standby list and she couldn’t do it herself, due to a ridiculous AA standby policy (AA hates there customers). I should also add that her later flight was oversold and was looking for volunteers (yes you can’t make this up)…
One would think that perhaps AA would empower there staff to make flying less stressful for at least a few days with other common sense gestures (aside from not selling CC’s)
Thankfully, after an act of god or compassion from the GA, she got her on the plane…
Name him.
Yes, the one who is as tragic as the crash.
I wonder how the faa controllers who got the “choose the fork” email felt after the email said they could be fired if they didn’t take a forced retirement ?
Or the people picking up body parts today ?
Again that’s why you don’t have a “hr” office that sends out blast emails to 2 millions workers
Thanks Elon
They should just deny that the crash was American Airlines. When there’s good news, we are all AA. When there’s bad news…that was PSA not American. Wikipedia is a fanboy like that. That’s the website that any bozo can change parts of any article.
Karen Bass should take a lesson. Be present when a tragedy happens. Not being halfway around the world at a party that has nothing to do with your job.