JetBlue is trying to bounce back

NEW YORK — When 130,000 JetBlue passengers had their February travel plans derailed by the airline's botched response to a winter storm, Russ Chew couldn't do anything but watch from his post as operations chief for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Now, Chew is JetBlue's new chief operating officer. And he and a nearly all-new management team are working to make sure the seven-year-old carrier doesn't go the way of past start-ups whose promise faded when fast growth and intense competition unmasked perilous flaws at the first sign of adversity.

Before that widely reported and widely lampooned Valentine's Day debacle at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, change was already afoot at the airline that developed a fanatical following as it grew to be the nation's ninth-largest carrier in just seven years. But when ice-induced gridlock stranded planeloads of passengers on the JFK tarmac for up to nine hours, and thousands of passengers were stranded inside the carrier's terminal, the pace of change went into warp drive. The decision to hire Chew, an operations guru, is just the most visible sign of that.

While Chew goes about the job of whipping JetBlue operations into shape, newly named CEO Dave Barger, the only holdover from JetBlue's original senior management team, is focusing on financial performance. On May 10, company directors voted to remove founder and former CEO David Neeleman from the day-to-day operation of the airline. Neeleman remains as nonexecutive chairman but recently sold nearly a quarter of his Jet-Blue shares for more than $27 million.

JetBlue's financial performance had been slipping long before Valentine's Day. To makes things right again at the once profitable airline, Wall Street analysts say — and Barger concurs — that he'll have to get the airline's operating costs back under control, and in all likelihood, slow its growth.

JetBlue now is at "the point where it knows it has to make some changes if it wants to be around long-term," says analyst Henry Harteveldt, who follows airlines for Forrester Research. "They have to evolve from a scrappy start-up to a more mature carrier."

• Customer rights. JetBlue has instituted the industry's first written guarantee detailing how passengers caught up in lengthy taxiway delays will be cared for and compensated. Vouchers for future travel will range from $25 to the full price of their ticket, depending on the length of the delay.