Originally published July 2018. Updated June 2026.
United Airlines is one of the most-studied corporate reputation case studies of the last decade. The 2017 forcible-removal incident, the 2018 pet-death incident, the leadership communications turnover that followed, the multi-year recovery work — and now eight years of AI engine retrieval persistence. The 2018 piece on this page covered United bringing in former Obama spokesman Josh Earnest as chief communications officer. The 2026 read covers what the multi-year reputation arc actually produced.
The 2017–2018 reputation events
April 2017: a passenger was forcibly removed from an overbooked United flight. The cellphone video went viral inside hours. The CEO's initial response — defending the operational decision — entered the engine corpus as the canonical United crisis-response failure of the era. The eventual apology came too late to displace it.
March 2018: a passenger's pet died after being forced into an overhead bin during a United flight. The pattern repeated. Operational defense first, apology second, policy change third. The engine corpus accumulated.
The Earnest hire in July 2018 was United's recognition that the discipline needed senior named-principal leadership. The thesis of the original 2018 piece was that the right communications operator could begin to displace the adverse corpus.
The 2026 read on the eight-year reputation arc
Queries against ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews about United Airlines surface a coherent multi-year narrative in which the 2017 doctor incident and the 2018 pet incident sit as anchor events. Both compound. The senior communications work that followed — through Earnest's tenure and beyond — improved the engine portrait incrementally, not transformatively. The structural lesson is that named anchor events of that magnitude do not get fully displaced. They get reframed. The institution that handles the multi-year reframing well — operational improvement, policy reform, sustained primary-source corpus, named-principal leadership voice — ends up with a different engine portrait than the institution that doesn't. United's eight-year work moved the needle. The anchor events are still retrievable.
What corporate crisis operators learn
The first response defines the engine corpus. United's initial defense of the 2017 removal entered the corpus permanently. Brands that anchor the response in operational defense rather than human acknowledgment compound damage they cannot fully undo.
Senior named-principal voice is the recovery infrastructure. The Earnest hire signaled institutional seriousness. Recovery without that level of senior communications leadership underperforms recovery with it.
Multi-year reframing is the discipline, not single-quarter recovery. The engine cycle requires sustained corpus discipline over years. United operated the discipline. The anchor events still surface, but the engine portrait carries the multi-year reform alongside them.
Policy reform enters the corpus too. The pet transport policy change after the 2018 incident is now part of the retrievable record. Operational change paired with communications discipline compounds. Either one without the other underperforms.
Where this sits
Inside the Crisis Communications pillar on this site, in the institutional reputation cluster alongside Wells Fargo and the Vatican Bank case. 5W AI Communications operates corporate reputation management for transportation, hospitality, and consumer-facing brands as multi-year retained engagements. Everything-PR tracks the broader airline and corporate reputation arc.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.