By Tom Mueller

Here’s a quick look at crisis communications around the Delta Airlines commuter plane crash at LaGuardia Airport in New York. (Note: Reposted from my 2015 crisis archive.)

As we have seen in many other incidents, social media lit up immediately after the incident. Passengers were tweeting and posting to Facebook from the plane. There is video online from just outside the plane showing passengers coming down the wing as they exit. Reports from the scene indicated the left wing was damaged and jet fuel was leaking from the fuel tank. (Think about that if you are tempted to tweet from a crashed airliner.)

Delta Airlines had their first statement out on Twitter at 12:02 p.m., about one hour after the incident. Subsequent statements were issued at 12:37 p.m., 2:09 p.m., and 3:20 p.m., or about every 90 minutes. A tweet accompanied the release of each statement. Delta chose to tweet the address to an online statement on the company’s news site, as opposed to tweeting the actual statement out bit by bit.

In my experience, this approach for using Twitter is typically driven by the lawyers, who don’t want the statement viewed in part on any one tweet; they want it viewed in its entirety, so Twitter is used to share that link to the company website. The company did not use its corporate Facebook account to communicate crash-related information.

Celebrity blogger and TV star Jaime Primak (@jaimeprimak) was on the plane (TV show is Jersey Belles, on Bravo). She both tweeted and posted to Facebook – from the aircraft – to her 19,000 + followers. She leveraged her position on the crashed airliner into a major network interview the next morning on NBC’s Today Show.

Another passenger shot the first photo from just outside the plane and posted it to Twitter. That person, @steveblaze98, had only four tweets on his account before he tweeted that photo and immediately became a media must-have interview. News media from many outlets, including print and broadcast, converged on him via Twitter looking for permission to use the photo, and were also requesting phone interviews with him ASAP. By the way, he now has eight tweets to his name.

The port authority of New York and New Jersey (@NY_NJairports), which runs the airports,  used Twitter to alert passengers and other stakeholders about the incident and the closure of airport runways. They also announced the press briefing time and location on Twitter, and took numerous questions from passengers trying to determine if their flights were on time.

Thankfully, everyone was able to walk away from that crash, and Delta seems to have avoided a secondary crisis by engaging quickly to position the company and provide information online and through social media.

As a side note, Delta maintains three different Twitter handles to manage communications to its various stakeholders. It used @DeltaNewsroom for incident-related communications; it also uses @DeltaAssist for passenger/customer communications, and @Delta for corporate communications and marketing purposes.

Finally, a bit of humor crept into the conversation a day after the incident, with one Twitter user noting:  “Apparently pilots from Atlanta can’t drive in the snow either.”