Late Summer 2001: American Airlines Develops New Crisis Plan, But Unable to Use it on 9/11

Some time shortly before 9/11, American Airlines revises its crisis communications plan. According to a PR Week magazine article shortly after 9/11, “Those charged with imagining worst-case scenarios laid out contingencies for plane crashes and 1978-style hijackings.” However, “They never dreamed of terrorists turning two aircrafts into weapons of mass destruction, of coordinating disaster communication with another airline in the same predicament, or of working in the shadows of the FBI.” Tim Doke, an American Airlines spokesman, later says, “We realized that nowhere in our plan did we contemplate such a circumstance” as what happened on 9/11. When the 9/11 attacks occur, American Airlines will have to abandon “its freshly minted crisis communications plan almost immediately… because the FBI rushed to American’s Command Center and made it clear who was in charge.” [PR Week, 11/5/2001; O’Dwyer’s PR Services Report, 1/2003]