What's the point of PR-speak if it inflames a situation it's meant to cool?
What's the point of PR-speak if it inflames a situation it's meant to cool?
Passenger is used as the subject, rather than object in your quoted passage. To see it in active voice, change "one of the passengers was politely asked...", to "SOME_SUBJECT politely asked one of the passengers...".
I've oversimplified, since it could be argued as active by adding the word "who",
"one of the passengers who was politely asked to deplane refused..."
but even if that's the case, then the master dodge phrase "it became necessary" cut SOME_SUBJECT from the second part. Note that the passenger is not doing the contacting in
"...and it became necessary to contact Chicago Aviation Officers to help."
Here's the active voice version, for contrast:
"We needed to contact Chicago Aviation Officers to help because the passenger unfortunately compounded the situation by refusing to deplane after we politely asked him to do so."
Notice that in the original statement, all humans have been moved from subjects to objects, mere instruments of authoritative concepts like "the situation" and "[what is] necessary".