On January 15th we witnessed commercial aviation history and saw first-hand the dynamics of crisis communications in today’s digitally-enhanced communications environment. 

Just before 3:30 pm Flight 1549 skimmed to a stop in the middle of the Hudson and immediately became the focal point of a squadron of news helicopters and scores of observers armed with every digital toy known to man.  Within minutes Tweets were flying, bloggers were posting and video was streaming across the Net.

Three hours later the ether was awash in coverage of Flight 1549 – over a quarter million Web pages highlighting the incident, several thousand related Twitter posts, nearly 3,000 stories from media outlets, over 400 blog posts, some 1,500 videos available online. ..all of this plus the expected deluge of coverage from traditional media channels.

The pace at which the news spread was as startling as the potential for catastrophic reputation damage had the landing gone differently.  What could have been a reputation nightmare for US Airways instead turned into something very different thanks to Flight 1549’s heroic pilot and crew.  As far as crises go, this was a “best case” scenario but few organizations get so lucky when crises hits.

Following the incident I wrote a white paper looking at the timeline of events during the early hours following Flight 1549’s miraculous landing.  From a communications perspective all did not go smoothly that afternoon and there is much to learn. You can download the white paper here.