JetBlue JFK terminal starts to calm down

[catlover79]

Associated Press
51 minutes ago



NEW YORK - A relative calm enveloped the JetBlue terminal at Kennedy Airport on Monday, Day Six of a schedule-busting siege in the wake of a massive Valentine's Day storm that left many travelers dismayed, disheartened and distrusting.

The company said it was canceling almost a quarter of its Monday flights but hoped to be back to full operations on Tuesday, almost a week after the snowstorm stranded planes on runways for hours and started a string of cancelations that led to JetBlue's travel meltdown.

At Kennedy Airport on Monday, travelers whose flights weren't canceled managed to come and go uneventfully.

Dawn Colonese of New Haven, Conn., arrived with her husband and two daughters on their way — they hoped — to a Florida vacation. Colonese had tried to call JetBlue to confirm on Sunday, but got a recorded message saying the system was overloaded; then she was disconnected.

"I wanted to get a human voice," said Colonese, who finally managed to leave a recorded complaint. An apologetic airline representative returned her call about five hours later.

When they got to the airport, the terminal looked orderly — unlike the crowd scenes of the past week. The departure and arrival boards noted only one delay, of 15 minutes, but did not mention all the canceled flights.

Colonese said if their vacation had been disrupted, "that would have been tough" — especially since it was timed around the children's school break.

Even though her family appeared to be fine, travel-wise, Colonese wasn't thrilled with what she'd seen from the sidelines: "I don't think I would fly with JetBlue again."

David G. Neeleman, the company's founder and chief executive, told The New York Times in Monday's editions that he was "humiliated and mortified" by the breakdown in the airline's operations. He promised that the company would pay penalties if customers were stranded on a plane for too long.

He said the crises was the result of poor communications and reservation systems. He said the ice storm had left many of the airline's 11,000 pilots and flight attendants a great distance from where they could operate the planes. He also said JetBlue lacked trained staff to coordinate the flight crews. The reservation system had also been overwhelmed.

The airline had scheduled 600 flights for Presidents Day, even more than the 550 to 575 flights on a normal Monday. Of those, 139 flights have been canceled, JetBlue announced late Saturday night.

JetBlue Airways Corp. spokesman Sebastian White said headway was being made on Sunday, but that the cancellations on Monday were needed to make sure all flight crews had gotten the legally mandated amount of rest before taking to the skies again.

"Canceling one more day's operations will really help reset our airline," White said Sunday.

All flights on JetBlue were canceled in and out of 11 airports: Richmond, Va.; Pittsburgh; Charlotte and Raleigh/Durham, N.C.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Austin and Houston, Texas; Columbus, Ohio; Nashville; Portland, Maine; and Bermuda.

White said the airline had been trying to warn passengers through phone and e-mail of flight cancellations over the past couple of days. JetBlue has been trying to reduce the backlog of passengers through a number of methods including flying charter flights, adding flights in certain sectors, rebooking passengers who had some travel flexibility to later dates, and booking seats on other airlines, White said.

The cancellations followed hundreds of other canceled and delayed flights since Wednesday, when a snow and ice storm grounded jets at John F. Kennedy International Airport, and all the way through the weekend.

Passengers scrambled to deal with the disruption to their plans.

"Oh my God, horrendous," Maria Arbelo, a teacher from New Haven, Conn., said of her experience. "It's been a terrible ordeal, I tell you. We've been from line to line."

Arbelo and two companions had been ticketed for a JetBlue flight to Houston on Saturday morning to get on a cruise to the Caribbean. That flight was canceled, as were all flights to Houston on Sunday. The airline put the three women up in a hotel for the night, and had them on a Sunday evening flight to Cancun. From there, they would have to find a driver to take them on a four-hour trip to meet their ship.

Arbelo said JetBlue staffers had been nice, but seemed confused among themselves about what to tell passengers.

"I laugh about it because there's nothing we can do," the teacher said, resigned to losing two days of her vacation.

Baggage handlers also struggled to deal with the mountain of luggage that had been dropped off by passengers, but returned to the terminals because of the cancelations. Some passengers complained that they couldn't leave the airport, even after their flights were canceled, because no one could find their bags.

White said the airline had teams out in New York City and Long Island on Sunday delivering luggage to customers.

Affected customers may receive refunds or rebook their flights, the airline said.

The airline said it initially tried to get its system back to normal by selectively canceling flights Thursday and Friday, but long delays continued as a result of constraints that included a one-runway operation at JFK on Thursday, and flight crews burning through the number of hours they are legally allowed to work before taking a rest.

Prior to the current crises, JetBlue was overwhelmingly popular and had high customer satisfaction ratings. Along with affordable fares, it is known for offering in-flight snacks of blue potato chips and DirecTV to passengers.

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Has anyone here ever flown JetBlue, btw? I never have. I hate to fly, and this is one reason why.

[dawsongirl]

Nah. I'd have to drive a long ways to even get to an airport JetBlue flies out of.

[James]

Doesn't George Soros of the Open Society Institute have a stake in JetBlue?

[theshark8777]

Originally Posted by James

Doesn't George Soros of the Open Society Institute have a stake in JetBlue?

relevance?
I don't know if that's true, but being a public company, I would imagine a lot of people have a stake in it.