Forgetting all the legalistics, this whole episode, the way it is unfolding, is the result of two intelligence failures:
- The first was an artificial intelligence failure of a computer selecting the human victims.
- The second was a human intelligence failure, sending out a Tweet message to the general public and then following it up by sending out a written but different internal message that in essence blamed the customer, based on only half the information in hand.
I suppose that Mr. Munzo in a panic of what to say, what to say moment, relapsed back to his previous CEO experiences at CSX, a freight hauling company at the time he composed the internal letter. He did get one item right, "There are lessons to be learned." (all the way from the top to the floor at UAL)