The Good, The Bad, and then The jetBlue
March 10th, 2007
Just got back from a weeks long vacation in Orlando Florida… First time I have ever flown jetBlue. Needless to say, I like them, but there were also some bad points too:
The Good:
- DirecTV and XM Radio (only on the E190 planes, that I was on). The DirecTV was really nice during my delay (more later).
- Friendly FA’s and Pilots. Some of the jokes I heard during the 4 flights:
- From the Pilot: Our flying time to JFK from MCO will be 2 hours and 8 minutes. Not much later one of the FA’s came on and said “Our flying time to JFK will be 1 hour (short pause) and 68 minutes”. The cabin just started laughing.
- While sitting on the apron at JFK getting ready for push back to PIT, the pilot came out and said “Well, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is there is a light that has come on that we don’t like. We think we can fix it by doing the good old CTRL-ALT-DEL, which I am sure many of you all know what that means. The next part of the Bad is that the plane will be with out power for 2 to 3 minutes. The good news, we should still get to PIT on time.”
- FA on same flight then came on and said “Since this is such a short flight, we are going to be doing an abbreviated service, which means you only get Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, Cookies and Chips, but if you are a really good passenger we will give you what ever you want.
- Different FA on the same flight while on the taxiway “Persons on the right side of the cabin if you look out your windows you will see a beautiful sunset over downtown New York City, and for those of you on the left side of the plane, well you still have the TV’s to look at.”
- After a really nice landing in PIT, the FA came on and said “Well how about that landing people, lets give the pilot a hand…” not to many people did anything, and then she said “well I can’t hear you so I am sure he can’t, so lets try again….”
- EXTRA LEGROOM.. The one thing I hate about being 6′5″ is that seats in coach are always too tight together.. Well check out these pics (even more amazing is this is on one of their Embraer 190 planes. The Airbus A320 was just the same):
- Free Wi-Fi at JFK, was nice to have something to do during a 4 hour layover. They also had some power plugs to recharge laptops while you were there. But they needed some more of those spread out.
The Bad:
- Not really too much bad went on, the only real complaint I had was out of the 4 flights I had only 1 arrived on time. The first flight from PIT to JFK was 40 minutes late leaving, (which was better than the flight from PIT to BOS, which was over 4 hours late leaving). The flight leaving JFK to MCO actually pushed back pretty close to schedule, but we then sat on the taxiway for almost 40 to 50 minutes waiting on our turn to take off. When we pushed back there were 15 planes ahead of us, and it looked as though ATC at JFK was only using one runway for arrivals and one for both arrivals and departures. So I ended up being almost an hour late getting to MCO.
- That is about the only thing I can think of that is bad. The delays on the taxiway are not under there control, that is a problem with JFK and they need to add some more runways or something.
Would I use them again, definitely, out of the 4 US airlines I have flown they so far have given the most bang for the buck.
