The Jet Blues

I feel sorry for Jet Blue Airlines right now. I personally like the airline (based on my one round trip to Washington D.C. a couple of years ago), but a lot of others aren't liking them a whole lot thanks to the problems they experienced this week following major winter storms which really messed up their schedule. Their CEO decided to quit messing around with delayed flights and basically called a "do-over" by canceling hundreds of flights and resetting the schedule:

NEW YORK — JetBlue, still reeling from a Valentine's Day snowstorm that forced hundreds of canceled and delayed flights, announced Saturday that it was canceling 23 percent of its weekend flights in an extraordinary effort to get the weather-battered airline back on some semblance of a normal schedule.

"JetBlue is taking this aggressive, unprecedented action to end rolling delays and cancellations, and to operate a new schedule reliably," the New York-based carrier said in a statement posted on its Web site.

All Saturday and Sunday flights on JetBlue were canceled in and out of 11 airports: Richmond, Virginia; Pittsburgh; Charlotte and Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Austin and Houston, Texas; Columbus, Ohio; Nashville; Portland, Maine; and Bermuda. A normal weekend would include about 600 flights, and 133 were already canceled.

The low-cost airline warned that additional cancellations were possible and advised travelers to check with JetBlue before heading to their flights. The cancellations will also allow JetBlue's flight crews to get mandatory rest periods.

Affected customers may receive refunds or rebook their flights, the airline said.

There is no hope of getting good publicity from canceling hundreds of flights, but they're probably doing the right thing. Rather than have the system struggle along with rolling delays and some cancelations, they've hit the reset button and started the whole thing over. This is probably the smartest thing they could do to get back into regular operation, and I wouldn't hesitate to fly them again if the opportunity arose.

Iin fact I made a valiant but failed effort to get our high school orchestra trip to New York booked on Jet Blue, but the extra $50 it was going to cost bushed the budget too far. I would have gladly paid the extra $50 for my daughter and myself in order to have the convenience of flying out of Long Beach and the relative luxury of having DirecTV in every seat to entertain us on the long flights. However, they booked the trip on Delta, which is still coming out of bankruptcy, instead. I hope I don't find myself standing in the airport going "I told you so" when Delta fails to perform.