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February 18, 2007
JetBlue Cancels More Flights in Storm’s Wake
By JEFF BAILEY
Continuing flight delays and cancellations led to angry confrontations on Friday night between JetBlue Airways and its passengers, prompting the airline to cancel 266 flights scheduled for the weekend.
JetBlue has been struggling to recover from an ice storm on Wednesday in the eastern United States that stranded hundreds of passengers. The airline, which is the biggest carrier at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, has canceled at least 861 flights since the storm; the 133 flights canceled each day over the weekend represent 23 percent of its schedule, the airline said.
“It was turning from an operational problem to a safety and security problem for our workers,” a JetBlue spokeswoman, Jenny Dervin, said yesterday. “We canceled late departures, upset more customers, met overnight and said, ‘This has just got to stop.’ ”
Irving Fain, a New Yorker who said that his 6:15 p.m. flight Friday from J.F.K. to San Diego was delayed many times and then canceled at about 10:30 p.m., described a scene at gate 16 in the JetBlue terminal with angry passengers crowding around the gate podium, a gate agent calling security, and then passengers and a security officer exchanging heated words.
“It was really a disaster,” said Mr. Fain, who is 26 and works for a radio station. “Passengers screaming, ‘We pay your salary.’ The security guy screaming back. Fifteen minutes into this ruckus, they finally canceled the flight.”
Ms. Dervin of JetBlue said that scenes like the one described by Mr. Fain “happened at a number of gates and at the baggage claim, too.”
The cancellations raise new questions about whether JetBlue’s management is equal to its ambitions. Early last year, after fuel prices had wiped out profit at the airline, it was forced to curtail an aggressive delivery program for new planes and focus more on making its existing operations run more smoothly.
On Friday afternoon, JetBlue’s chief executive, David G. Neeleman, acknowledged that he should have canceled more JetBlue flights on Wednesday to avoid stranding for more than six hours hundreds of passengers on nine planes that could not get to the gates at J.F.K. In an interview, Mr. Neeleman said of the spillover of delays to Friday: “Day three: unforgivable.”
JetBlue said early yesterday that it had scrapped 133 of nearly 600 scheduled flights for both yesterday and today because of a shortage of flight attendants. It essentially grounded its entire fleet of 26 Embraer 190s, which are 100-seat planes, and moved any available flight attendants from those planes to its fleet of bigger Airbus 320s.
That grounded all flights to and from Austin, Tex.; Bermuda; Charlotte, N.C.; Columbus, Ohio; Houston; Jacksonville, Fla.; Nashville; Pittsburgh; Portland, Me.; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and Richmond, Va.
Ms. Dervin, the JetBlue spokeswoman, said that the airline called all of its pilots and flight attendants on Friday afternoon to determine where they were and how many hours of flight time they had left under government work rules, and simultaneously was patching together a new full schedule for the weekend.
“Sometime in the afternoon, it just fell apart,” she said. “The folks running the operation are just exhausted. We said, ‘Let’s stop the madness.’ ”
Some additional cancellations are likely, Ms. Dervin said, and delays of up to two hours were also continuing yesterday.
JetBlue said that customers whose flights had been canceled would receive full refunds or credits and could rebook their flights any time through May 22.
Mr. Fain, the New Yorker who never got to San Diego, said his surfboard, checked for his flight, still had not shown up early Saturday afternoon. He added that he would not fly JetBlue again.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
JetBlue Cancels More Flights in Storm’s Wake
By JEFF BAILEY
Continuing flight delays and cancellations led to angry confrontations on Friday night between JetBlue Airways and its passengers, prompting the airline to cancel 266 flights scheduled for the weekend.
JetBlue has been struggling to recover from an ice storm on Wednesday in the eastern United States that stranded hundreds of passengers. The airline, which is the biggest carrier at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, has canceled at least 861 flights since the storm; the 133 flights canceled each day over the weekend represent 23 percent of its schedule, the airline said.
“It was turning from an operational problem to a safety and security problem for our workers,” a JetBlue spokeswoman, Jenny Dervin, said yesterday. “We canceled late departures, upset more customers, met overnight and said, ‘This has just got to stop.’ ”
Irving Fain, a New Yorker who said that his 6:15 p.m. flight Friday from J.F.K. to San Diego was delayed many times and then canceled at about 10:30 p.m., described a scene at gate 16 in the JetBlue terminal with angry passengers crowding around the gate podium, a gate agent calling security, and then passengers and a security officer exchanging heated words.
“It was really a disaster,” said Mr. Fain, who is 26 and works for a radio station. “Passengers screaming, ‘We pay your salary.’ The security guy screaming back. Fifteen minutes into this ruckus, they finally canceled the flight.”
Ms. Dervin of JetBlue said that scenes like the one described by Mr. Fain “happened at a number of gates and at the baggage claim, too.”
The cancellations raise new questions about whether JetBlue’s management is equal to its ambitions. Early last year, after fuel prices had wiped out profit at the airline, it was forced to curtail an aggressive delivery program for new planes and focus more on making its existing operations run more smoothly.
On Friday afternoon, JetBlue’s chief executive, David G. Neeleman, acknowledged that he should have canceled more JetBlue flights on Wednesday to avoid stranding for more than six hours hundreds of passengers on nine planes that could not get to the gates at J.F.K. In an interview, Mr. Neeleman said of the spillover of delays to Friday: “Day three: unforgivable.”
JetBlue said early yesterday that it had scrapped 133 of nearly 600 scheduled flights for both yesterday and today because of a shortage of flight attendants. It essentially grounded its entire fleet of 26 Embraer 190s, which are 100-seat planes, and moved any available flight attendants from those planes to its fleet of bigger Airbus 320s.
That grounded all flights to and from Austin, Tex.; Bermuda; Charlotte, N.C.; Columbus, Ohio; Houston; Jacksonville, Fla.; Nashville; Pittsburgh; Portland, Me.; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and Richmond, Va.
Ms. Dervin, the JetBlue spokeswoman, said that the airline called all of its pilots and flight attendants on Friday afternoon to determine where they were and how many hours of flight time they had left under government work rules, and simultaneously was patching together a new full schedule for the weekend.
“Sometime in the afternoon, it just fell apart,” she said. “The folks running the operation are just exhausted. We said, ‘Let’s stop the madness.’ ”
Some additional cancellations are likely, Ms. Dervin said, and delays of up to two hours were also continuing yesterday.
JetBlue said that customers whose flights had been canceled would receive full refunds or credits and could rebook their flights any time through May 22.
Mr. Fain, the New Yorker who never got to San Diego, said his surfboard, checked for his flight, still had not shown up early Saturday afternoon. He added that he would not fly JetBlue again.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
