David Neeleman
The U.S. Department of Transportation said that if this week's talks with airlines do not result in voluntary schedule reductions at New York's JFK Airport, the agency might impose schedule caps that reduce peak hourly operations by up to 20 percent. One of the nation's largest airports, the international and increasingly domestic gateway is the hub and home of JetBlue, whose founder and chairman David Neeleman this month spoke to the New York City Business Travel Association. Carriers are over-scheduling flights, "squatting" on takeoff and landing slots, clogging taxiways and causing "chaos," Neeleman said while taking questions from NYCBTA participants, as excerpted below.
You have complained about Delta stacking up its flights at JFK, but wouldn't Delta say, "Look what we've done for the competitive landscape for air travel out of New York?" How would you respond?
If somebody wants to take the capacity of the airport above the limit for the gates and clog the ramps for Terminals 2 and 3 so planes can't get out on the taxiway, and can't taxi by them, somebody needs to tell them they can't do this. You're affecting everyone else. You have planes lined up for takeoff for long periods of time because there are so many arrivals at that time. Being able to run these systems efficiently takes priority over competitive advantages when you have a situation where there's chaos. And that's what we have when you have so many more flights than what the airport can handle. Would I like to go to Washington Dulles airport and bring low fares there? Absolutely. Do I think Congress should go in and rip some slots away from airlines that own them and don't use them often or are flying short distances to squat on their slot? Absolutely. So we need to have some balance between competition and being able to get new entrants into a city and being able to say, "This is the maximum capacity of an airport until we get some new technology to kick it up." Until then, it's just chaos.
What about a priority system? If you fly a higher occupancy plane or go to certain destinations, should you have priority?
Yes, why don't we do that? The Port Authority [of New York and New Jersey] put together a really great plan when they talked about LaGuardia and slots and priority. If you were to go to LaGuardia and count the number of flights going to Greensboro, N.C., there are flights every 45 minutes throughout the day. Does Greensboro need that kind of service to LaGuardia? Now--for people in Greensboro and the congressman that American Airlines or Delta calls and [tells] "LaGuardia is trying to make me take flights out of your community"--they're going to say it's not going to happen and we'll write a bill and stop those LaGuardia guys. But, in effect, what [the airlines] are doing is squatting on slots. That's a huge issue. Everybody has a vested interest, and they really try to use the "small community" thing to squash what the Port Authority does to try and allocate the efficient use of valuable gate and slot time at the airport, for the best use of this city.
The debate continues about a free market passenger bill of rights versus a legislative bill of rights. Can you tell me in a nutshell the JetBlue experience, and more importantly what the customer says about the bill of rights?
First of all, we have to make sure that we don't go over capacity, and the FAA needs to make sure that we do that. They're problem solvers. My big concern with the [federal] bill of rights was that, on many nights we have this capacity issue already. On a perfect night we might have an hour and a half outbound delays, and then a thunderstorm comes along and closes those four flight paths out of town. So all traffic leaving New York is stopped, and you're in a line of about 50 airlines waiting to take off. We sit for an hour and a half to try to let the thunderstorms clear, and then we start taking off. You've been on the plane now for three hours, and you're number five for take off. This federal legislation I read said that you had to take the airplane back to the gate. It's absolutely ridiculous. Those people on the airplane don't want to go back to the gate. They want to go where they were going. They woke up early, bought a ticket, packed their bags and they're going to Aruba--they're not going back to the gate because someone in Washington thought that was best for them. Does it mean that we have to provide food, water, bathroom facilities and TVs for everyone? Absolutely. Those are things that we should be forced to do. We have to have an evacuation plan so if someone becomes deathly ill, we can get out of line.
How do you feel about the Port Authority's Nov. 1 takeover of Stewart International Airport, 55 miles north of New York City?
We're big fans of Stewart. We put flights out of there, if you want to go Florida. Once you leave from [Stewart], if you live remotely close to that airport, you're never going to go back and fly out of JFK. There's an issue getting high-speed rail up there to get people out of the city. That's obviously a costly thing and will take some time, but we're in favor of adding as many flights as we can sustain out of there. We're working closely with the Port Authority. It's an education process. Everything is easy up there, and obviously more difficult at JFK.
An FAA flight path redesign plan in New York is aimed to reduce delays by 20 percent, but it would increase noise levels for residents in some surrounding counties. You have said that the planes will be flying too high above those counties to be noticeable, but how do you explain that to angry residents?
When we first started flying out of JFK, I went in to meet with the Queens Borough president [then Claire Shulman] and she said, "We don't want you here." I showed her a noise footprint graph, and the 85-decibel noise of an Airbus 320 did not leave the airport. It just diminished as you went further out. We're worried about it for people just around the airport, and to be worried about it for something 50 miles away is absolutely ridiculous. What (her last name) was concerned about was, at the time, there were 727s flying that were "hush kitted". The noise footprint for a 727 hush kit is 20 times greater than that of an A320, so it was a completely different thing. The new generation of planes is very quiet. It's an emotional issue, obviously.