Crisis Management : Fatal Collision at LAX Becomes a Public Relations Nightmare for SkyWest, USAir Officials

Ron Reber, vice president for marketing at SkyWest Airlines, had just come in from his Friday evening jog when the phone rang at his home in St. George, Utah. Flight control was on the line. “We have an irregular operation,” the dispatcher began. “All we know is there’s something wrong in Los Angeles.”

It was only four minutes after a USAir jet had flattened one of SkyWest’s Metroliner commuter planes in an explosion of flames, but those details would not become apparent for hours. Reber, 38, grabbed his car keys and, still in his sweaty running togs, sped out of the house.

At the same time in Los Angeles, the phone was ringing at the home of USAir spokeswoman Agnes Huff. She abandoned the dinner she was cooking--sauteed red snapper--and grabbed her date book, her emergency manual, her USAir phone directory and a portable phone. Then she headed for the airport.

Soon Reber and Huff were thrown together on the front lines of a public relations nightmare: a fatal airplane crash. Their cautiously worded statements in the hours and days following the disaster would help shape the flow of news coverage of the tragedy and--equally important--the image of the companies for which they work.

Airline officials know all too well that their actions in the first hours after a crash are crucial. Early rumors--reports of birds in the engine, for instance, or cocaine in the cockpit--may color the public’s view of an airline for months or years to come. And while the emotional energy of corporate spokesmen may be directed toward the victims and their families, one question is bound to dominate their thinking: How will this affect the company?

“The first thing that enters your mind,” says Reber, “is, ‘Were we in the wrong?’ Obviously, for the system to fail all these passengers, somebody or something went wrong and you hope it wasn’t a human error that one of your employees made, you hope it wasn’t a mechanical failure of your airplane, you hope that whatever it was that failed, it wasn’t something within your control.”

On her way to the airport Friday night, Huff feared the worst. The radio had been reporting an eyewitness who said the USAir jetliner’s landing gear was not down during its descent. Huff automatically discounts such reports from untrained observers. Still, it nagged at her. What if the eyewitness was correct?

It was to be the first on-the-scene test of skills that Huff had been honing for a decade. The 36-year-old former flight attendant made a major career change in 1978, after several of her friends were among 144 people who died in a disastrous mid-air collision over San Diego. She said the deaths, and the subsequent suffering of the survivors, heightened her interest in helping people cope with such tragedies and she pursued a master’s and doctorate in aviation psychology. Two years ago, she transferred to USAir’s corporate communications staff.

But to the throng of reporters and television cameramen amassed at the USAir terminal Friday night, Huff was just another corporate mouthpiece. She had only a few morsels of information to give out: 94 people (the accurate count was 89) were on board USAir Flight 1493, which was on its way from Columbus, Ohio. “There are many, many survivors,” she said.

But she would not say much more. Airlines have detailed protocols for responding to airline disasters, and for public relations people there are two iron-clad rules: No finger-pointing, even if the accident appears to be somebody else’s fault, and absolutely no speculation. In an era when lawsuits pop up within days after a crash (one has already been filed by a survivor of the accident) caution is a byword.

Reber, meanwhile, was on his way to Los Angeles on a private flight with three other SkyWest corporate officials. His wife had brought him a change of clothes; he shed his jogging shorts and sweat shirt in the aisle of the plane for a business suit. He spent the rest of the time reading background files that other SkyWest employees had quickly collected on the pilots and the plane’s maintenance.

Also on the way was a “go team” from the National Transportation Safety Board, which has the authority to investigate plane crashes. When the NTSB arrives on the scene, it orders airlines not to release any information on the progress of the probe, and not to discuss possible causes.

NTSB investigators, however, might not show up until a day after the crash, and until then, airline public relations officers must shoulder the burden of facing the press--and, more important, the public--alone.

Given that there is not much an airline can do to put a good face on a plane crash, industry officials say the best course of action is to tell the truth--albeit in a limited way--and to help put the disaster in perspective by offering safety statistics that put the company in a positive light.

Reber and Huff, for example, immediately made public information about the age of their planes (the entire USAir fleet is less than 9 years old, Huff said) and the considerable experience of their cockpit crews.

“The company has to be concerned with assuring the public that air travel remains safe, appropriate, permanent, sensible, logical and possible,” said Paul Turk, an analyst with Avmark, a consulting firm that specializes in aviation economics. “You do not want public confidence in the industry--not just your company but the whole industry--eroded.”

In August, 1985, after 137 people were killed when a Delta L-1011 jetliner crashed and exploded into flames on its approach in Dallas-Ft. Worth, the airline informed reporters that it made 2,400 departures a day, with airplanes taking off at a rate of one every 36 seconds.

These tidbits later filtered into news reports and, according to Delta corporate spokesman Bill Berry, helped the airline’s image. “We found that the news media reports did not challenge our record,” he said. “The public did stay with us.”

Word choice is also extremely important. In her first news conference following the crash, Huff announced only that 29 people were “unaccounted for,” which could have meant anything--that they were dead, at an undetermined hospital or had walked away from the crash without telling anyone. It was not until two days later that the company changed its language to “unaccounted for and presumed dead.”

But there are also other--less above-board--tactics that airlines use to influence public perception in the wake of a crash. Scott Hamilton, a former airline public relations man who is editor of Commercial Aviation Report, says some airlines have been known to send maintenance crews to paint over the company logo on an airplane that has crashed. That way, the airline’s moniker is not popping up on the evening news in future footage of the wreckage.

Airline spokesmen say that these days, most airlines shy away from such strategies, knowing they tend to backfire. One industry insider recalled an incident several decades ago in which Eastern Airlines maintenance men were photographed as they painted out a logo on the wreckage of a plane. When the picture appeared in the next day’s newspaper, the airline’s name was clear as could be--written in bold letters across the backs of the workers’ coveralls.

A more common move is to sequester surviving passengers and the families of victims. Immediately after Friday’s crash, Huff announced that the survivors, as well as family members who were awaiting the plane’s arrival, were being held in a private USAir lounge. A security guard was stationed at the end of the hallway leading to the lounge; no one was allowed in or out without a USAir escort.

Huff explained that this was necessary to ensure the privacy of the passengers. But there is an ulterior motive, says Chris Witkowski of the Aviation Consumer Action Project, a Ralph Nader group that monitors commercial airlines. The last thing airlines want in the news, he says, are interviews and photographs of grieving families.

“They don’t want the flying public to be exposed to images of people traumatized and their lives torn apart,” Witkowski said. “. . . They give the impression that they’re trying to protect the passengers from questioning and harassment, but the airline is trying to protect itself from adverse publicity.”

From a public relations standpoint, it is crucial for an airline to express genuine concern about crash victims and their families. To this end, they offer transportation, room and board as well as counseling for families arriving at the crash site, and frequently send their top officials to the scene.

On Saturday, the day after the USAir-SkyWest crash, USAir Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Edwin I. Colodny held a news conference in Los Angeles in which he expressed the company’s “deep sadness on the tragedy.” Two years ago, after 107 people were killed when a United Airlines DC-10 crashed in Souix City, Iowa, the company chairman traveled to Souix City, where he visited injured passengers and crew members in the hospital.

Following a major air disaster, it is customary for the entire airline industry to suspend advertising, in somewhat of a gentleman’s agreement. The length of the suspension seems to vary from crash to crash. When 156 people died in the 1987 crash of a Northwest Airlines plane in Detroit, the airline waited two months before resuming the advertising campaign it had been running. Likewise, USAir suspended its advertising this week.

Airlines also know that the public can be extremely fickle about what it remembers in the wake of a crash. More than two years after Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, the airline is still plagued by complaints that it could have prevented the explosion, which was attributed to terrorists.

Pan Am spokesman Jeff Kreindler said the airline had a particularly difficult time countering news reports that revealed government officials had previously warned airlines of terrorist threats. The reports, he said, have left a lasting public impression that Pan Am’s security was lax.

At Los Angeles International Airport last Friday night, Huff and Reber had no way to know what the lingering images of the crash of USAir Flight 1493 and Sky-West Flight 5569 would be. Nor could they foresee that their public relations job would grow easier in the days that followed, as the NTSB investigation focused on the actions of an air traffic controller and a faulty airport ground radar system.

Reber had arrived in Los Angeles hoping that some of the SkyWest passengers and crew were among the survivors. Those hopes were dashed as soon as he saw the twin-engine Metroliner commuter squashed under the belly of the larger USAir jet. At an 11:30 p.m. news conference--more than five hours after the crash--he decided to tell reporters that it was apparent no one had survived.

Huff’s job was more difficult; it was unclear how many USAir passengers had died. She confirmed only that the pilot had been killed, that 57 people were slightly injured or not injured at all, and that there were some fatalities. The precise number would not be determined until two days later.

She did, however, make certain to put one issue to rest. The USAir plane, she said, had touched down without a problem, its landing gear intact.

Confusion in the Tower A National Transportation Safety Board official said the air controller involved in the crash of the USAir 737 and a SkyWest commuter plane says she thought the runway was clear for landing. The controller says she mistook another small aircraft not yet on the runway for the SkyWest plane. The SkyWest commuter and the Wings West plane are the same models. 1. SkyWest commuter plane was sitting on Runway-Left. 2. USAir 737 was approaching for a landing on Runway 24-Left. 3. A small Wings West commuter plane was sitting on a taxi way preparing to move onto Runway 24-Left. A large Southwest Airlines 737 was in front of the Wings West plane. The air controller monitoring the movements on Runway24-Left says she did not see the SkyWestplane. She says she mistook the Wings West commuter plane for the SkyWest plane, and therefore concluded the runway was clear.