Death of American’s Reputation

Sure, today’s younger generations have a few advantages we didn’t have when we were their age, but as BoomerCafé co-founder and communications professional David Henderson writes, that doesn’t always make it a better world.

When I was a kid growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, American Airlines had one of the most romantic images in the sky, with its shiny silver planes. My family didn’t travel by air often because we, like a lot of Americans in the post-World War II era, just didn’t have the money. But I remember the … well, it was the feeling of riding on a plane back then and sitting in a seat that was actually spacious even for an adult and swallowed up a kid like me. All that is fast-changing before our eyes. We baby boomers may be the last generation with those memories of great legacy airlines … and great service.

And with the huge catastrophe in early April when American had to cancel thousands of flights to make minor repairs to many of its aircraft, I think we may have witnessed the death of American Airlines’ brand reputation, caused largely by self-inflicted poor corporate communications. Just plain bad PR. Yes, the airline was faced with the real problem of fixing the aging wiring in its aging fleet of MD-80 jetliners, some dating back to the ’70s. Yes, the airline should have been able to spread it out over months rather than being forced into immediate and economically costly action by the FAA. Yes, the airline dragged it feet while the top executives were paid millions to keep down expenses.

It would have been so easy to get out ahead of this aggravating issue for the flying public, use more contemporary methods of communications, and show some empathy. But American created its own form of crisis communications by poor communications and lousy PR. There’s a lesson here for other companies in the U.S.

Ripping a page from 1970s-style corporate communications, American’s CEO, Gerald Arpey, said there was nothing to be alarmed about. “Irrespective of FAA oversight, no one would put a plane in service that wasn’t safe,” he told The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “I put my kids on these airplanes all the time.”

A lot of people today might be responding, “Gee, Mr. Arpey, I don’t really care about you or your kids … I just wanted to get home because my mom was ill” or “We wanted to attend a wedding tomorrow … but we can’t because you screwed up.”

Why didn’t Arpey call the nation’s media to the airline’s repair hubs and personally show them the relatively minor nature of repairs and try to explain the problems? Why wasn’t he the “voice” of his airline, as Richard Branson would have been, rather than issue a series of statements through a spokesperson?

Why didn’t Arpey show up at key cities and personally apologize to passengers who got slammed by the airline with cancelled flights and spotty refunds? Why wasn’t he walking the ticket counters, interacting with customers, taking their names and personally making promises to make good on their inconvenience? Why didn’t the airline make better use of the Web to reach out to the hundreds of thousands of passengers who got stuck and penalized when clearly it was American’s fault? This is modern corporate PR. American acted like it was 1978, not 2008.

If you checked American’s web site during the week when they shut down thousands of flights and inconvenienced hundreds of thousands of travelers, it appeared to be business as normal … except for one little line: “Aircraft inspections affect some AA travel.” No kidding.

I think American Airlines dug a hole so deep that it’ll be hard to fly out of. What they could have done when we were kids didn’t work. You’d think the baby boomers running the company would have figured that out.

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