Interpretations and Crisis Comms: What We Learned From the Near Drone Collision at LAX

For those of us living in or traveling through Los Angeles, we all heard about the Lufthansa plane nearly colliding with a drone over the weekend. Pretty scaring stuff. Police were everywhere. And of course, the story dominated the local news -- newspapers, broadcast, radio, etc.

Every story seemed pretty straight forward, providing details on the airline involved, time of day, the location in the air, and on and on. With all of those numbers and quotes from experts and even government officials, it seemed like nothing was amiss.

But then look at the comment sections.

You will see a variety of responses around the legitimacy of the location of the near crash from self-proclaimed drone enthusiasts. I’m not discrediting the reporter or the experts he talked to. But after looking at the comments, you have to ask yourself if this was a fully researched and neutral story.

We should certainly be protecting airspace around airports (and I’ve learned from my drone enthusiast fiance some of the restrictions already put in place) but some of the facts don’t add up and make it out to be an anti-drone scare-tactic story.

After reading this story, I immediately thought of the scene in the latest season of House of Cards when Seth Grayson, Frank Underwood’s director of communications, under extreme duress due to a major crisis (but again, isn’t everything with the Underwoods a crisis??) looks to his PR team and essentially says…”Fix the errors. Unless it is burning, don’t bother me.” I can imagine the communications and policy teams at Drone manufacturers like DJI, 3dr and Walkera were scrambling after these stories appeared, trying to better educate reporters on highly enforced airport-related regulations and logistics.

In the eyes of many readers, this was probably almost tragic story. For others, it was an opportunity to push an agenda. But for me and others in PR, it looks to have the underpinnings of a crisis comms situation. A PR person’s job isn’t always to push an agenda, product or service. Sometimes it is to educate and ensure the facts of a story are being published accurately.