As you probably know, they’ve found low traces of a radioactive substance onboard two British Airways B767s which operated, among other routes, the route London Heathrow – Stockholm Arlanda and back. A third aircraft has also been taken out of traffic due to forensic examination. As it happens, I was originally booked on flight BA 786 from Heathrow at 7.50 PM on 16 November but I managed to get onboard an earlier flight which according to the travel agent probably was BA 784. None of these are on the list of affected flights.
On several places I read that BA are trying to locate passengers that were on these flights and in a press release the company says:
“The airline is continuing to make every effort to contact 33,000 customers who travelled on 221 European flights operated by the three aircraft identified by the investigation.”
Media report about passengers that have not yet been contacted. I’m sure it is a challenging task to locate all these passengers in a short period of time. Some estimate the number of affected Swedish passengers to about 2,000.
Dagens Nyheter has interviewed several passengers that are critical against the way BA have handled the situation. The treatment from BA’s help line is described as “cold”.
Rest assured that there is major crisis management going on at British Airways today and I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for them because as far as I know, this incident is not the airline’s fault. Nevertheless, by not managing the crisis properly they run the risk of damaging their brand. If the gap between what the company says and what it does is too large, customers will take offense.
Tags: Alexander Litvinenko, British Airways, crisis management, polonium,polonium, krishantering. Ping.
