It’s a tense moment for air travel. As consumers grow increasingly weary of bad customer service experiences, Boeing’s frightening safety failures of the last few years continue to echo in the public consciousness.
For David Neeleman, who founded JetBlue 25 years ago and now leads Breeze Airways, the string of recent aviation mishaps doesn’t invalidate the broader safety gains achieved in air travel.
“Traveling by air on a 737 Max is incredibly safe, it is unbelievably safe,” Neeleman said Wednesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah. “It’s really hard to think of the last accident Americans have had in a large transport airplane…It’s been so long.”
Neeleman, the chairman, CEO, and founder of Breeze Airways CEO, is a true believer in the airline business despite its many challenges. Founded by Neeleman in 2018, Breeze is a rare thing—a new low-cost airline. Breeze focuses on smaller cities, and about 90% of its routes have no non-stop competition.
The company is looking to solve for some of the most salient customer service flubs in the airline industry. At Brainstorm Tech, Neeleman told the audience that Breeze currently cancels less than one in 1000 flights, and aims to be the “most on-time” airline. (The company is currently in the process of hiring a new Chief Customer Officer, he added.)
One advantage that wasn’t around when Neeleman founded JetBlue in 1999 is AI, which the Breeze CEO believes will play a role in the future of air travel.
"I think AI will play a huge part in the operation of our airplanes—for better fuel economy, for predictive maintenance,” he said. “So, we can predict when parts are going to fail quicker, so we have less cancellations, and more connected apps that understand you and know you better… I think AI is going to change the customer experience dramatically, make it better and we’ll communicate better with our customers and lower our marketing costs.”
Still, it all ultimately comes back to safety. And Neeleman knows that the fears tied to air travel don’t exist in a vacuum, saying to moderator and Fortune senior reporter Jessica Mathews: “Obviously I can't dismiss people like you and everybody else, but it really isn't an issue,” he said. “But safety is our number one value."
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