Storm Flattens JetBlue for a Week

JetBlue has worked hard to carve out for itself a reputation as a new-but-not-squalid airline. It made a point of having leather seats and satellite TV in each seat. It served blue potato chips instead of stale pretzels. People actually liked flying it compared with other carriers. Since February 14, the airline has had thousands of customers stranded and hundreds of flights cancelled because of the bad weather on the eastern coast of the US. Oddly, the other airlines flying in the region are not having the same degree of difficulty. Someone’s screwed up.

A bad, but far from historic, storm hit the New York area last Wednesday, and JetBlue was hit pretty hard because it flies a great many planes out of New York’s JFK airport. According to CNN, "some passengers spent up to eight hours in planes stranded on runways at John F. Kennedy International Airport, unable to take off due to the weather and unable to return to terminals because of insufficient open gates. Hundreds of passengers sat in planes that were sometimes not heated, that ran out of food and had no clean toilets. During the following two days, JetBlue said it was canceling 17 percent to 27 percent of its scheduled flights ‘in order to help reset the airline's operation’.”

JetBlue’s founder and CEO David Neeleman has offered his deepest apologies and has promised refunds and free tickets to make up for the whole mess. He has said he is “mortified and humiliated.” All the same, he told the New York Times, “Is our good will gone? No, it isn’t. We fly 30 million people a year. Ten thousand were affected by this.” That could be 10,000 customers and their families that won’t be coming back, in addition to days of bad press so far.

Like the other low-cost airlines, JetBlue doesn’t have an agreement with other airlines to rebook passengers on another carrier. For example, if a United passenger misses a connection in Denver to New York, she can be booked on a later Frontier flight – at no cost. JetBlue doesn’t have that luxury, or maybe necessity is the better word.

As a result of this mess, Congress may finally get into the act and enact an airline passengers’ bill of rights. The industry is naturally opposed: David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, told CNN, “We think that one size doesn’t fit all. We think the best solution continues to be to allow the flight crews and their operational experts to make these type of decisions.” Clearly, the evidence of this last week suggests otherwise.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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