Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

USAir flight 405 skidded off the runway at La Guardia in March 1992 into Flushing Bay causing the loss of 27 lives.

Delta flight 1086 skidded off the runway at La Guardia in March 2015. It stopped at a barrier short of the river. There were no fatalities. 

There's no doubt that the first was the more serious incident, but Twitter was not involved. On this occasion passengers were able to tweet and upload footage to YouTube. First hand accounts are much more powerful than observer accounts. That's why the awful Brian Williams pretended to be on a helicopter which was shot down rather than merely observing the incident. 

Tweets are necessarily brief, but they are sincere and human. People want to know what the passengers involved saw and felt. Delta's tweets were informative, but full of jargon – "exited the runway" and "deplaned". The second offered a link to more information. The airports and the port authority reacted better. 

Delta's first tweet contained the important message: 

Our priority is ensuring customers and crew are safe.

But the relatively slow and infrequent responses from the Delta Newsroom, the use of jargon, and the absence of any @ replies to people who tweeted does not reflect well on the response. The main Delta twitterfeed does not contain any reference to the incident.