American Airlines Full-Blown Crisis

Introduction

Without a doubt, United Airlines (UA) has experienced many firsts throughout their history as a leading United States Legacy Airliner. On April 9th, 2017 United Airlines experienced yet, another first that would prove damaging their fragile reputation. During that evening an event occurred where a “passenger [was] violently removed from United Airlines Flight 3411 bound for Louisville, Kentucky” (Czarnecki, 2017). Despite the nature of the incident having the potential to create a global crisis, notably social media and unorganized, professional crisis management efforts drove the “manageable [public relations] situation to quickly evolve into a full-blown crisis that continued to nose-dive with a sequence of additional unfortunate events” (Phelon, 2017). In reality the efforts to contain and respond to the crisis were hindered by an unorganized response by United Airlines. Furthermore, United began being cast in

In particular the background information about commercial aviation, in addition to the history and core beliefs of United, the events that occurred on UA Express Flight 3411, and the stories that spread like wildfire through the media paint an encompassing view of how United Airlines was significantly impacted during the full-blown crisis.

Background Information The complex nature of commercial aviation creates immense gaps and obstacles for organizations, like United Airlines, to address. Given that demands for lower travel cost have caused “since the 1950s, airline yields (defined as the average fare paid by a passenger per kilometer) [to] consistently [drop]” companies have had to search out alternatives to continue to operations (Clayton, 2014). Thus, creating throughout the industry a growing pressure to reduce costs and improve