US Airways has offered an explanation and another apology after a pornographic image was shared from the airline's official Twitter account.
The carrier said the photo was sent accidentally to one of its customers who launched a series of complaints against the airline on Monday. The image featured a womanposing with a toy plane inserted in her vagina.
"We apologize for the inappropriate image we recently shared in a Twitter response," Davien Anderson, a spokesperson for the airline, said in an statement emailed to Reuters. "We deeply regret the mistake and we are currently reviewing our processes to prevent such errors in the future."
Airline representatives said the image, which originated from a German amateur porn site, was sent to the airline's Twitter account by another user. Employees in charge of the airline's Twitter account meant to flag the image as inappropriate but mistakenly included it as part of a reply, USA Today reports.
"Our investigation has determined that the image was initially posted to our Twitter feed by another user. We captured the tweet to flag it as inappropriate. Unfortunately the image was inadvertently included in a response to a customer," said Matt Miller, another US Airways spokesperson.
The airline took down the image after an hour and issued an apology on Twitter, but not before thousands of users saw it, generating a lot of controversy — and plenty of crude jokes.
The incident isn't the first online mishap that the airline has faced since merging with American Airlines, the BBC points out.
On Sunday, a 14-year-old Dutch girl tweeted threats at American Airlines as part of a joke. American Airlines responded with threats of notifying law enforcement officials. Both the girl's and the airline's tweets have since been deleted, but that didn't stop police in Rotterdam from arresting the girl.
She was later released.
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