Five months later, Kelleher fired Neeleman. The reasoning: Even your biggest fans can't take any more of you, Kelleher told him. Neeleman wasn't minding his P's and Q's as much as obsessing over them, trying to make his mark on Southwest and failing to keep his ADD in check. He'd been in charge of merging the two organizations over a two-year timeline. He'd gotten it done in six months but had driven his colleagues to distraction with his intensity.
Back in Salt Lake once again, Neeleman dreamed of starting another domestic airline, but he had signed a five-year noncompete clause. He looked to Canada and became an investor and co-founder of WestJet. And he thought about innovations he could bring to the industry even without planes. A relational database that Neeleman and a Morris Air colleague had developed to analyze fares, schedules, and profitability, as well as issue e-tickets, became the basis for a new reservation and data platform, Navitaire.
It's used by many airlines today, including Breeze. The pair sold Navitaire to Hewlett-Packard in When he founded JetBlue in , Neeleman leaned heavily on one of the concepts he'd borrowed from Kelleher: servant leadership.
It's a popular philosophy and simple concept: You work for your employees, not the other way around -- and one of the key aspects is walking the talk. If you make it everyone's responsibility to serve the customer, then you'd better do likewise, boss.
Kelleher would regularly work on board, serving drinks naturally and even helping clean planes -- quick turnarounds were vital to Southwest's success. Neeleman transported the concept of happy people running a happy airline to New York. And, like Kelleher, he set the tone by prowling JetBlue's planes, serving beverages, asking customers how he could do better.
And he helped clean the jets. Like Kelleher, Neeleman is a people collector. For Breeze, he got part of the JetBlue band back together. Critically, he added recruits from ULCC pioneer Allegiant, who brought with them strategic financial insights. His leadership style is so different from that of most CEOs," says Doreen DePastino, Breeze's vice president of inflight, station operations, and guest services and one of the JetBlue tribe.
People gravitate toward him. These are analogous to issues most businesses face, but in aviation everything is magnified. At JetBlue and now Breeze, Neeleman has sought new answers. The "where" question has been perhaps the easiest one to figure out for Breeze -- because, even before the pandemic, both the major airlines and the ULCCs were giving up turf. Partly because of their union contracts, which limited their ability to fly smaller jets, the majors were packing more people onto bigger planes.
As the ULCCs matured, they did the same thing. Small and medium markets get left behind. When Breeze analyzed the data, it discovered a whole category of cities and routes being underserved.
The FAA compiles a statistic called passengers daily each way PDEW that contains exactly where people are traveling and what they are paying on average. A market such as Huntsville, Alabama, to Orlando has relatively low PDEW because it's inconvenient to fly between those two points; passengers have to change at Atlanta or Charlotte.
In city pairs like this, Breeze thinks it can expand the PDEW exponentially by offering direct service. A new airline is one step closer to flying in the United States. The Transportation Department has given the all-clear to Breeze, which is owned by Neeleman, who founded JetBlue Airways two decades ago.
According to a Transportation Department order posted Wednesday, March 10, , Breeze Aviation Group has up to one year to begin flights using up to 22 planes.
Connect with the definitive source for global and local news. Investor Relations. Travel Agents. Site Map. Contact Us. Web Accessibility. Contract of Carriage. Tarmac Delay Plan. Customer Service Plan. Human Trafficking. Optional Services and Fees. JetBlue was an egalitarian airline, with its aircraft configured in an all-economy layout and no first-class cabin to be found. The airline's aircraft of choice was the Airbus A, a twin-engine narrow-body aircraft capable of flying coast to coast with ease.
It was the first time that Neeleman had opted for Airbus aircraft in one of his ventures, with Morris Air and WestJet both operating Boeing aircraft. But it wouldn't be the last. His next venture after Jetblue, Azul Brazilian Airlines, already uses Airbus planes, and his newly-announced Breeze Airways has dozens on order. After two years of planning, February 11, would see the first JetBlue aircraft take to the skies with passengers onboard.
A ceremonial flight to Buffalo was operated earlier in the day, an homage to Senator Schumer and the other New York politicians that helped JetBlue get off the ground. JetBlue still maintains close ties to the state, keeping its headquarters and main base in New York, and even partnered with the state for a special aircraft paint scheme. Following the first flight, JetBlue quickly grew from New York to cities across the country. Less than three years after its first flight, the airline had 38 aircraft in its roster and served 18 destinations from as close as Syracuse, New York to as far as Oakland, California.
Soon after its East Coast launch, a secondary base was opened in Long Beach, California with a mix of transcontinental routes and short-haul routes to nearby destinations such as Oakland and Las Vegas. JetBlue then launched its first route to a destination outside the contiguous US, San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the company would eventually form a base, in The Caribbean would later grow into a major destination region for JetBlue, with the airline growing to serve numerous Caribbean islands from Cuba to Trinidad and Tobago and nearly everywhere in between.
Doubling down on passenger-focused amenities, the airline announced in that it would be removing seats from its aircraft to offer customers more legroom, up to 34 inches in some seat locations.
Boston, which would later become a secondary hub for JetBlue, was added to the route map in with a slew of routes to cities across the country. Following rapid domestic expansion, JetBlue set its sights outside the US for the first time in when It opened its first international route between New York and Santiago, Dominican Republic.
In , JetBlue celebrated the arrival of a new aircraft to its fleet, the Embraer E The Embraer E was chosen to serve JetBlue's regional and thinner routes while the A was kept on the medium-haul routes.
The interior of the E would be identical in terms of amenities offered, though it would be arranged in a seating configuration instead of the A's configuration. The aircraft would first be used on the New York to Boston route initially and could largely be seen on JetBlue flights under two hours or on routes with low-demand.
Earlier that year, however, saw JetBlue experience its first in-flight emergency. Flight , a routine flight from Burbank, California to New York, was forced to make an emergency landing in Los Angeles when the aircraft's front landing gear malfunctioned.
After hours of circling and tense waiting, the aircraft eventually landed in Los Angeles and the JetBlue name had been brought to the forefront of the public's attention from the media coverage of the event.
Two years later, the airline underwent a leadership shakeup, with Founder and CEO David Neeleman being elevated to chairman of the board and David Barger taking his place as chief executive in
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