Update 6/10/2010 at 11:00am CDT:  I sent 2 emails yesterday afternoon to American Airlines’ Public Relations department and while I got several odd “out of office” emails back, no one yet has responded to my inquiry on whether or not they plan to comment or react to this video. 

 Original post:

So, I found this video this yesterday evening:

The real lesson in all of this is for American Airlines.  You never know *who* is flying on your airline and *who* your employees are potentially harming or lying to on any one day.  It might be some powerless schmo and it might be a powerful executive.   Even worse, it might be someone with pretty good graphic skills and who knows how to both tell a story and edit a video that goes viral beyond an airline’s worst dreams. 

The guy will probably gets some satisfaction from this.  Probably a new bike and based on what I saw, that’s probably a $2000+ bike.   But the cost isn’t the bike.  The cost is the PR nightmare that this will become over the next few days when this video truly goes viral worldwide.  And it’s good enough to do so.  The cost of everyone at AA now scrambling to deal with this will far exceed the cost of the bike and their efforts won’t fully repair the image problem. 

You can read more about the author’s problems at NYC Aviation.

Filed under: Airline Service, Trivia by ajax