Neeleman's talents took flight with JetBlue

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), May 21, 2006 | by Dan Fitzpatrick Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

JetBlue Airways founder David Neeleman never excelled at school or sports, and he remembers painfully the self-doubts that plagued him as a teenager, when he lacked the patience to read an entire book or write adequately. "It really didn't feel like I was going anywhere," he said.

It took a late-teens journey through the slums of Brazil to turn Neeleman's life around and set the impatient, easily distracted college dropout on a course to create Jet-Blue, based in Forest Hills, N.Y., the best-financed startup airline of the deregulated era.

Neeleman's evolution from bored, uninspired student to restless airline entrepreneur is a story of several failures, how he recovered from them and his ability to turn potential weaknesses into strengths.

Many of JetBlue's best-known features -- its knack for customer service, for salesmanship, for equal treatment of all passengers, for a pledge to "bring humanity back to air travel" -- can be traced to Neeleman's South American pilgrimage and the lessons he learned about himself along the way.

Six years after JetBlue's launch, Neeleman is now a messianic figure in the hypercompetitive, cutthroat airline industry, the latest in a lineage of colorful, oddball leaders that includes chain- smoking, whiskey-swilling Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher and millionaire playboy Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic.

The key difference, perhaps, is Neeleman's strict religious principles -- he is a seventh-generation Mormon and father of nine known for his Sunday-night-dinner conversations with friends about faith and family. And he spends much of the time attempting to recruit converts in his Wall Street-laden suburban Connecticut neighborhood, where he is a ward mission leader.

"Think of Richard Branson who doesn't carouse and doesn't drink and you have Dave Neeleman," said well-known airline consultant Darryl Jenkins, a fellow member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who knows Neeleman. Airbus Chief Operating Officer John Leahy, calling from the airplane manufacturer's offices in Paris, described Neeleman as "Herb (Kelleher) without the Wild Turkey and the cigarettes."

Like both Branson and Kelleher, Neeleman is popular with employees and passengers. He rides his planes at least once a week, announces himself over the intercom, walks up and down the aisles with snacks and takes suggestions from passengers (often jotting them down on a napkin).

He joins in the cleaning of the aircraft. He pals around with the baggage handlers.

Diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, which explains his teenage aversion to reading and writing, Neeleman refuses to take medication, afraid it will dull his creativity.

During a brief stint with Southwest Airlines in 1994, Neeleman's disregard for corporate protocol offended many at the Dallas-based discount giant. In meetings, according to Barbara Peterson's book "Blue Streak," he would scribble in his notebook, over and over, "DSAW," short for "Don't Say A Word."

But many others in the industry remain charmed by his restless energy -- Neeleman claims his disorder allows him to focus almost exclusively on a single goal, the success of JetBlue. Mike Chen, head of North American sales and marketing for GE Commercial Aviation Services, still recalls a meeting where the JetBlue CEO climbed atop a conference table at the GE unit's headquarters to show his excitement about the new airline.

"Very amusing," said Chen, a neighbor of Neeleman's in suburban Connecticut.

Neeleman's boyish impatience and sincerity can be awkward sometimes, concedes Barbara Peterson, the author who spent years chronicling JetBlue's rise. But he is also "the kind of person who can really mesmerize a crowd when he is really on."

Behind Neeleman's cult of personality is an airline that so far has defied the track record of countless airline startup failures since Congress deregulated the industry in 1978. Profitable for its first four years -- it lost $20 million last year due to the rising cost of jet fuel -- it is now the country's 10th-largest carrier, in terms of traffic, and by the end of 2010, plans to climb to 30,000 workers, from 10,000 currently, and to 275 planes, from 99. The company consistently ranks among the industry's best in customer satisfaction, with live TVs at every seat, fashionably dressed flight attendants, pizza during long layovers at the airport and a policy never to overbook -- that is, sell more tickets than seats.

Still, while JetBlue has been an unprecedented success for a startup, "I think (Neeleman's) keenly aware of how easy it is to stumble in this business," Peterson said. Even today, living in an 8,000-square-foot home in suburban Connecticut and atop an airline with more than $1 billion in revenue, he knows that his competitors - - especially the major airlines hurt by JetBlue incursions in the East -- are waiting for him to slip up.

Some analysts already are warning that JetBlue's hot streak may be over. Its on-time performance is down, its costs are up and it is taking on a new type of plane, the 100-seat Embraer 190, which will complicate everything from main- tenance to training and move the company away from the simple model that got it started.