After an Air India plane crash, the CEO essentially lifted his condolence speech from someone else’s publicly available remarks after a different airline disaster. Word for word.
I have no words. Which is ironic, since that is precisely the problem.
Setting aside the ethical dimension of plagiarism — which is considerable — think about what this tells us about Air India’s state of preparedness. A major international airline, flying hundreds of thousands of passengers, had not prepared their own language for one of the most foreseeable crises in their industry. A plane crash is an aviation company’s worst possible day. It is, by definition, the day for which they should be most prepared, both operationally and communicatively.
Instead, the CEO went looking for words somewhere else.
Nothing communicates ‘we don’t actually care about what happened’ more efficiently than stealing someone else’s grief. The people affected by this crash — families, friends, colleagues — deserved language that was written for them, specific to their loss, from a leader who had thought about what to say and meant it.
Authentic crisis communications doesn’t require eloquence. It requires honesty and specificity. It requires you to acknowledge this situation, these people, this moment. A statement that could have been delivered after any airline crash by any airline CEO is, by definition, not doing that.
The lesson is straightforward: if you operate in a world where tragedy is a genuine possibility, spend the time now — in peacetime — building the language, the frameworks, and the muscle memory you’ll need when the worst day comes. Don’t wait until you’re reaching for someone else’s words.