American Airlines rocks on Twitter during the AA24 security threat, while passengers tweet from the plane

Thanks to David Parker Brown, I was alerted to a security situation on American Airlines flight 24 (AA24), bound to New York from San Francisco as someone had called in a threat to the jetliner. Thankfully, within a few hours all passengers had de-planed and gone through security checks and no one was hurt.
Crises Management 2.0 – Live on Twitter!
While the situation was unfolding, there were at least two passengers (@cmckella & @jaysears) on board the airplane who were tweeting away regular updates of the situation from their perspective, which included photos of the cabin and cops around the aircraft. Soon enough, major newspapers and news channels were quoting these two for the most current information about what’s happening on-board the aircraft.

Though, it wasn’t long till American Airlines’s Twitter account (@aairwaves) jumped into the middle of the arena and took on the queries head-on. It seemed like they had read our infographic on crises handling through social media (see below), because AA did a good job at it….