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.