When JetBlue Management Faded To Gray

In the Monday morning quarter-backing following the recent JetBlue operations collapse, the recurring cry seems to be: "Where were the decision-makers?"

In the 1970s era Airport movies, the airlines had Joe Patroni, a cigar-munching chief engineer portrayed by George Kennedy. He was always good for an ad hoc decision in a crunch (and invariably while snowbound). Among his more memorable lines: "We'll be back on time if I have to pull that plane out with my teeth!"

No such hero came to the rescue of JetBlue's stranded passengers. David Neeleman, CEO of JetBlue, apologetically stated the reasons for the calamity: "We had so many people in the company who wanted to help who weren't trained to help. We had an emergency control center full of people who didn't know what to do. I had flight attendants sitting in hotel rooms for three days who couldn't get a hold of us. I had pilots e-mailing me saying, 'I'm available, what do I do?'"

There seemed to be no script to follow and no cue prompter. JetBlue was a one act play with a well-known micro-manager directing. Who was running their risk management side- show?

While JetBlue was making its own analysis, one travel expert suggested the airline had brought the crisis on itself by trying to do the right thing for its passengers despite the wintry weather threat.

"Most airlines don't try to operate when there is an ice storm problem. They've learned that it's better to cancel all flights at the outset and then try to get back to normal operations as quickly as possible," David Stempler, president of the member-supported Air Travelers Association, told the AP last week.

The company's got some problems that are unique, like the fact that most of its reservation agents live in Salt Lake City and work from home. Alone, unsupervised and each with their own schedules and priorities: is that any definition of a team? You start to wonder how many of the higher ups in management work from their homes and therein may lie part of the problem.

The "powers that be" were obviously not jointly located in an office or at JFK, and were thus unable to get a clear picture or grasp up-to-date developments at their JFK hub. It was like trying to get an orchestra to symphonize across a teleconferencing call. Interaction by phone or computer may work, but only as long as an operation runs on rails.

Perhaps it's the difference between an emergency control center that's designed to deal with an accident's aftermath and an operations center that is attuned to synchronizing a multitude of malevolent variables. Factors also contributing:

1. Hub at a busy airport (JFK) which is overutilized during the evening and when European flights arrive in midmorning to early afternoon.

2. Most flights are long or at least medium haul, thus spreading equipment to remote sites.

3. High rates of aircraft utilization (many red-eyes).

4. Because of route structure, crews spread out all over the county and prone to being timed out.

5. No interline arrangements which could be used to rebook passengers even the next day.

6. Extremely high load factors making it very difficult to rebook pax in groups on own carrier.

The outcome of the initial eight hour stranding fiasco, played out a few feet from a T6 gate at JFK, has been a scramble by both lawmakers and JetBlue management to produce a Passenger's Bill of Rights (PBoR). But nothing is as simple as all that. Hard and fast rules can sometimes defeat the purpose.

If an aircraft is within 15 minutes of getting take-off clearance yet the PBoR rule says to turn back at the "180 minute since boarding" mark, nobody gets to where they're going and the airline's schedule will still be in disarray. That's where air-rage cuts in and things can get even nastier than the weather outside. It remains uncertain as to who is best qualified to judge the situation and make stop-or-go decisions related to onboard environmentals, pax mood, aircraft serviceability, onward sectors, and the likelihood of the weather improving or cycling.

It's not rocket science for the average captain. However, it would seem that in JetBlue and many other airlines, the captain is a general factotum who simply does what he's told. If the authority to make those types of unit decisions, albeit in consultation with operations staff who may have the bigger picture, has been removed, that's the greater peril. From the outside looking in, that does seem to be the case.

Imagine an army without platoon sergeants, all awaiting coherent orders from a besieged Company HQ. When weather is the controlling variable, game-plans are out the window.

The transition from startup/high growth company to a mature and stable corporation is nearly as difficult to pull off successfully as getting the company started in the first place. The JetBlue story is an example of a company that had "made it" into the big time, yet still had not undertaken the metamorphosis that needed to happen at a corporate and management level.

Three inches of heavy ice is always worse than a foot of powdery snow, but it shouldn't be permitted to generate mayhem.