Air India CEO in hot water over condolence message after plane crash, netizens demand ‘authenticity’

Air India CEO Campbell Wilson is in hot water over his condolence message after the deadly crash, which claimed the lives of 241 on board and several more on the ground.

Karthik, a communications strategy consultant, claimed that his speech was “plagiarised” from American Airlines CEO Robert Isom's January 30 condolence speech. Angry netizens demanded ‘authenticity’.

Isom was consoling the death of 67 people after a commercial jet collided with a military helicopter near Washington, DC.

In an X post, Karthik shared the text of the two speeches and highlighted the sentences that matched.

These include, “This is a difficult day for all of us”, and “I know there are many questions and at this early stage, I'll not be able to answer all of them, but I do want to share information I have at this time”.

Check out the similarity between the two speeches here:

Here's how netizens reacted:

Social media users were stunned by the level of “competence” of the Air India boss and said, “Crisis communication demands authenticity.”

“So Air India boss even copied the condolence message? What competence!” an angry user said.

“Crisis communication demands authenticity. The striking similarities between Campbell Wilson’s statement and Robert Isom’s speech raise serious concerns about corporate messaging. In times of tragedy, sincerity matters more than scripted responses,” said another user.

Industrialist Harsh Goenka also reacted to the tweet, calling it a “good perspective”.

However, several users pointed out that they were “not surprised” by the similarities in the speech because “messaging in such situations will always be very similar.”

“Is it really plagiarism? The SOPs in such situations are common, and if standard procedures are common, using similar/same verbatim to express thoughts is common too,” said another user, adding that there are multiple things to criticise Air India about, “but this, in my opinion, is far fetched”.

“These are standard communication guidelines followed by leaders during such unforeseen accidents. We should rather focus our thoughts and prayers to the grieving families. For the curious minds: how such an accident happened despite tech advancements is where need to focus,” another user said.

A user also suggested that both CEOs may have used the same consultants, Artificial Intelligence (AI).

To which Karthik replied: “I tried multiple prompts across ChatGPT, CoPilot, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. They all returned original-seeming text but not verbatim copies.”