No news is good news.
At least that was true back when I was an airline ticket agent in DCA from 1969-1979.
It's hard to describe how very quickly bad news in our industry was passed. It was almost as if, when something terrible occurred, all airline employees suddenly became psychic and passed the news on to each other.
My best example is the crash of Eastern Airlines flight 66 at JFK on June 24, 1975. It seems to me as if even before the plane was done caroming down the runway, we knew about it. I was working that day at DCA, and my supervisor quietly, one by one, told us all that EAL had had a crash at JFK. It was a genuine tragedy. Here's a link to the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_66
I could give examples of various other crashes, and detail how incredibly quickly the news made itself known in the airline industry.
On September 11, 2001, I was, like so many other people that morning, glued to my television after the first airplane crashed into the World Trade Center. As soon as the second crash took place, I immediately tried to contact a couple of former co-workers (at this point I was long out of the airline industry) to find out exactly what was going on. One had already left his home for an appointment, and for the other I didn't have a current phone number. But a few days later they confirmed to me that yes, by the time the first impact occurred the airline people knew exactly what flights had been hijacked and where they were headed. No surprise to me. In fact, I kept on being frustrated at the time by the reports that clearly had not included airline agents' information.
Never underestimated the power of the airline industry.
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