How Breeze plans to become the world’s nicest airline

“We just want to be the world’s nicest airline,” is how David Neeleman describes his latest venture, Breeze Airways. “That’s what we deliver on.”

The 61-year-old is a serial creator of airlines, with five under his belt. (He has also found time to father 10 children.) But unlike most aviation dreamers, Mr Neeleman has the knack of launching the carriers the world needs. He has founded or co-founded numerous low-cost, high-quality airlines, including the Canadian carrier WestJet and America’s jetBlue.

We meet while he is on a brief visit to the UK for the launch of jetBlue’s London-New York service – which, it turns out, was 14 years in the making.

“I was looking at it way back in 2007. Given our network in JFK, it would have made a lot of sense to serve the big destinations that Americans love to go to – London, Paris, Italy,” he says.

By 2008, Mr Neeleman had parted company with the New York airline he started, and the idea went on the back burner.

“They took their time, it was just a matter of when. And they finally made it.”

A narrow-bodied jetBlue aircraft parked at a gate at Heathrow Terminal 2 looks initially odd – as might an easyJet plane at New York JFK. But the current jetBlue chief executive, Robin Hayes, assured me there will be many more. As the airline did at slot-constrained La Guardia and Reagan National (the close-in, preferred airports in New York City and Washington DC, respectively), “we’re going to have to elbow our way in”.

David Neeleman, meanwhile, has his eyes on more modest prizes in his latest blue-sky thinking. There is hardly a scrum for take-off and landing slots at Huntsville in Alabama or Providence, Rhode Island, the two most recent additions to the network of Breeze Airways.

“Our goal is to get people there twice as fast for half the price,” he tells me. The idea is to connect “secondary” cities that are poorly served by the network airlines. It used to take what felt like 24 hours from Tulsa in Oklahoma to Tampa in Florida, with a minimum of one change of plane in a vast airport such as Atlanta, Houston Intercontinental or Dallas-Fort Worth.

I am glad to see that I can buy a ticket for the 150-minute, 1,000-mile flight today for just $94 (£68). Nice.

Thanks to the seat map Breeze provides for its Brazilian-made Embraer commuter jets, I can also see that around two-thirds of the seats are open. That may mean people have yet to choose (or have allocated) their places, or that the plane will have wide, open spaces as it drifts over Louisiana and Alabama en route to Florida’s Gulf coast; probably a bit of both.

New airlines and new routes take time to establish. Being nice is one thing: making a profit is another. Yet David Neeleman believes there is a whole swathe of travellers waiting to be found by Breeze. I guess you could call it “levelling up”: kindly providing links for the people left behind by bigger players.

“When you do that, you can generate a lot of traffic,” he says. “So we took the actual traffic before we started, and what we’re seeing now, we’re 10 times the size of the market.”

I wonder how many passengers – who, from an airline perspective, are infuriatingly promiscuous – will be attracted by Breeze’s claim to be “a new airline merging technology with kindness”?

The founder says the proof will be how the carrier behaves during disruption.

“There’s a lot of things that go bad in the airline business, with delays, but if we can be nice in the process that’s really good.”

A lot of things can go bad with start-up regional carriers, too. Typically, once they have established a market and proven a route, a mainstream airline moves in with bigger planes to grab passengers.

There are plenty of predators out there: ultra-low-cost Frontier and Spirit, as well as the high-quality/low-cost champions, Southwest and jetBlue.

The trick will be to create a “Goldilocks” network of routes big enough to sustain commuter jets but too small to attract attention. David Neeleman believes he can do just that. Nicely.