JetBlue leaders well aware of the work they have to do, doubling down on commitment to Boston Logan

Close readers of the Globe may recall that I penned an open letter to Marty recently, urging his airline to do better. I mentioned the dreary and worn plane interiors I had been in. I described those planes rattling through the sky like MBTA buses with wings, and noted that JetBlue had the worst on-time performance record of major carriers and owned last place in The Wall Street Journal’s annual ranking of airlines, all while it has continued to lose money every quarter since the pandemic.

Looking back, that does sound negative, but I also pleaded with Marty to do whatever is in his power to make it right. JetBlue, quite literally, means the world, or at least the nation, to Boston, with more nonstop flights to more places than any other airline, and a sensibility — at turns brash, innovative, and scrappy — that very much matches our own. Please, I asked, give Boston the airline we want and need, the airline you used to be. Show us a plan.

I didn’t actually mean that he should show me a plan, but a day after the column ran, I received an email from JetBlue headquarters saying that Marty would like to meet, so there we were, just me, Marty, a pair of strapping JetBlue executives, and what I suspected would be all sorts of hard feelings to resolve.

Which is when Marty kicked things off by saying, “You’re basically right. There’s nothing in that letter I disagree with.”

OK.

In short, St. George said the leaders of JetBlue are well aware they have work to do, even as they remain proud of their company. They also believe, to their collective core, that they can fix what’s gone wrong, and they vow that Boston remains utterly central to their future.

“It’s why I came back,” he said. You see, Marty St. George, a native of Hingham who currently splits his time between Boston and New York, is a JetBlue true believer. He joined the company in 2006, rose to the position of executive vice president and chief commercial officer, and left in 2019 for high-level stints with a European airline and then a South American airline. He was lured back to JetBlue as president in February by newly appointed CEO Joanna Geraghty.

In that room, he was somehow different than what I expected — ever so slightly disheveled, relentlessly upbeat, passionate about flying and what it means for people to board a jet and see the world.

“I love JetBlue,” he said. “I love the people. I love aviation. There’s a world of 8 billion people struggling to get along with each other, and what we do is show people the world. Everything would be better if we understood each other a bit more. We have a role in bringing people together.”

Which is, of course, noble and high minded, but the question remains: How do you start bringing people together on cleaner, more modern planes that operate on time? How do you return to profitability so it doesn’t feel like the airline is in a constant state of decay?

To that, St. George said there’s no magic answer or secret strategy, but rather the classic, in his words, “three yards and a cloud of dust.” He said that first and foremost, there’s a new leadership team that will bring fresh ideas and higher standards. He said they’ll be adding service at Logan even as they’ve cut flights to other, less profitable cities. And he said the airline is in the process of sidelining all of its aging Embraer 190 regional jets and replacing them with brand new Airbus A220s, which run on less fuel even as they carry more passengers.

But, and this is an important but, he said that almost all of the Embraers in the JetBlue fleet fly through Boston, because it’s where the flight crews are based, and the last of the planes won’t be retired until the end of 2025.

“We can’t get new planes fast enough,” he said.

I asked him whether Boston is as important to JetBlue as JetBlue is to Boston, and he was emphatic.

“Boston is extremely important,” he said. “I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished here. It’s a market that has been underserved for many years, and we have the data that shows that we’ve brought down fares across the board.”

JetBlue’s biggest challenge, he said, is that it exists in this netherworld between low-cost carriers and massive legacy airlines, and even as it disrupted markets like Boston, it lacks the scale of, say, Delta, which runs neck-and-neck with JetBlue for most passengers out of Logan. And now, St. George admits, Delta and United have caught up with some of JetBlue’s innovations, like seatback TV and free Wi-Fi.

So they will double down on their commitment to passengers, he said.

“We are an underdog up against giants,” St. George said. “It’s tough to be a little guy in this industry. The only way to succeed is to make it better.

“This is a Dunkin’ company,” he said, referring to lines from the letter I wrote to him comparing JetBlue to Dunkin’ and Delta to Starbucks. ”We are a challenger brand. No one made Boston a priority. It is a priority for us.”

When I asked how JetBlue had fallen from its heyday, he said the airline was hit particularly hard by the COVID travel downturn, and it was hammered by the failed purchase of Spirit Airlines, which many industry experts always thought was a questionable idea. St. George wasn’t at JetBlue at the time.

He did push back on the notion that JetBlue was no longer innovative, pointing specifically to its Mint premium sections on long-haul flights, and its new flights to European capitals from Boston and New York on narrow body planes that are less expensive to operate. “Nobody’s coach product is as good as ours,” he said.

St. George then guided me out of the windowless room, through the terminal, to a newer gate. There, we boarded one of the new A220s, and I can confidently report that I was stunned. This was not the JetBlue that I’ve been flying, but was the JetBlue that once was, and what St. George is striving to be again. The plane gleamed bright white, with blue accent lighting, and sharp gray leather seats, modern, immaculate, and inviting.

St. George paced the plane, proudly and restlessly, noting the legroom, the quality of the seats, the size of the overhead bins. When I left, I was more convinced than ever that Boston needs JetBlue. St. George was unequivocal that JetBlue needs Boston.

Let’s hope, for everyone’s sake, that the journey to a better airline hits little turbulence and arrives on time.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].