Newhouse School of Communications

October 30, 2009

by Christy Perry

The passengers and crew of US Airways Flight 1549 knew the plane was going down on that cold January afternoon. What they didn't know was that they would land in the Hudson River, survive the crash and live to tell the story.

Newhouse alum Jim Olson was also in the hot seat after that plane went down. As Vice President of Corporate Communications for US Airways, he was stunned to hear that the plane had hit a flock of geese and fallen from the sky.

"My stomach twisted and turned for about five minutes," Olson told a group of Newhouse Public Relations students in late October. But in those five minutes, his associate had already completed a press release about the crash. Olson and his team took off into their own wild ride.

Olson detailed that fateful day for a crowd packed into the same Newhouse 1 classroom where he sat in the early 90s. His public relations degree and career have taken him to a trio of companies and more than 20 countries. He presented the January 2009 Flight 1549 crash as a lesson in crisis communications for the students.

When Olson took the corporate communications position at US Airways, the company already had a crisis communications plan. "It actually looked like a constitutional law book," he recalled. One of his first orders of business was to take that 450-page manual and distill it into a 10-slide PowerPoint presentation.

With the plan in place, his team sprang into action. The flight, piloted by Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles, made the emergency landing in the Hudson just about five minutes after take-off from LaGuardia. Across the country at US Airways' Phoenix headquarters, Olson's office set up a 'war room' with a phone bank and received 350 calls within the first 90 minutes after splashdown. Meanwhile, back in New York City, 150 passengers exited over the plane's wings.

Also in that first hour and half, the corporate communications team held a media briefing. Olson says that in an emergency, job one is for all communications professionals to "man your battle stations." US Airways' PR machine plugged information into pre-formatted press releases and an online template on their website. He stressed that establishing an online US Airways presence immediately was key for the company to communicate with the families of passengers and the media.

Also in the US Airways plan were payments of $5000 to each passenger, to help them pay for hotels, medical expenses and other needs they had after the harrowing experience.

Olson says one major lesson learned in the Flight 1549 crisis, which news media nicknamed "The Miracle on the Hudson," was to have a Twitter account in place before a disaster. US Airways didn't have Twitter before the crash, but quickly set up an account and has been tweeting ever since. His office uses the Twitter feed to make major announcements quickly, including a recent announcement about 1,000 US Airways layoffs in 2010.

In all, Olson says, the January airplane crash generated nearly 4,000 blog posts, 288 online videos, nearly 4,000 Tweets, 207 photos posted to Flickr and 30,000 Captain Sully Facebook fans.

View the New York Times' interactive timeline slideshow here. A video re-enactment animation of the crash is posted on YouTube.

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