Airport Posts Plane Crash Photo To Facebook, Deletes It, Apologizes

If you run a Facebook page, for an airport, you might not want to post a photo of a plane crash. Especially if said plane crash involved the death of a child and you're making light of it.

"Because we are such a super airport...this is what we prevent you from when it snows...Weeeee :)," the caption read, alongside branding for Luton Airport, the London-based airport making the post.

The Independent notes that the photo depicted a plane crash at Chicago's Midway Airport in 2005, an accident which led to the death of a child.

The following screengrab was captured before the photo was removed from the London Luton Airport Facebook page:

According to the BBC, a spokesperson for Luton Airport said of the post, "a new, over-enthusiastic member of our support team made an honest but misguided mistake and clearly stepped over the line."

The airport is known to be light-hearted in its Facebook postings, which have included this dog and this cat in the past 48 hours. At the time of this writing, it continues to get criticized in public wall posts about the plane crash photo.

British journalist Emily Jupp wrote of the incident:

When posting on social media, people often fail to acknowledge the tiny but very important difference between the things you think inside your head and the things you think and then say and then share with millions of other people, which happens outside your head.

"We apologise unreservedly," the airport's spokesperson told Britain's ITV News. "The post was wholly unacceptable and it will never happen again."

(Hat tip, HuffPost UK)