Speaker 1: There's survival as an enterprise, which is typically a financial cash flow kind of an issue. And then there's the survival of a brand. We had a dream that we could really bring humanity back to air travel. I thought, oh my gosh, here we have really stubbed our toe on our most fundamental proposition. We're just like everyone else. So on Valentine's Day 2007, JetBlue had an event that marks our history, and we hate to have to keep revisiting. But we stranded a bunch of passengers on the tarmac at JFK. A storm came in that was freezing rain. And actually what happened was the tires of the aircraft froze to the tarmac. And the planes couldn't be moved. So planes were landing, but no planes could take off. The runways were like glass. And so we were unable to get buses out to get people off of the planes. That meant people were stranded for seven, eight, nine hours on planes. Within the terminal, crowds were building up and getting more and more anxious and boisterous. Our general counsel went down, and I remember him telling me that he had to stand on the counters with a bullhorn to try to settle people down. I do know that it takes a long time to rebuild a schedule. Once you've grounded planes, once planes have built up in a certain area, it takes time to get them dispersed, to get your passengers out again. So it took several days to rebuild the schedule. At this time, I was the lead director. I was not in town at that point in time and couldn't have gotten into town. So I heard about it and was brought in by telephone to talk to people and was quite concerned about it. David Nielman, who'd founded the airline, was apoplectic. He wanted to fix it and make sure that it never happened again. He then proceeded to go on all of the talk shows and apologize. There were several of us on the board that thought, gosh, we're no worse than anybody else. We just happened to be a large carrier at JFK. We happened to be the hometown airline. And I remember pulling him aside and saying, David, enough apology. But he felt so bad that he went ahead and did that. And I think he was right. I think he actually helped restore the brand. I think the immediate role of the board is to make sure that we solve the problem on the ground. Beyond that, we have to ask the question, is this something that could happen again? So the board decided fairly early on to bring in an outside consultant to go through all of our systems, top to bottom. We set up this internal team of 100 people from all walks to look at IROPs. IROPs are irregular operations, and they're typically triggered by weather events. But I think what we found in doing our own analysis of IROPs was that we could do better at communications, at scheduling, the nuts and bolts of running the airline. The second thing is when we brought in outsiders, they also said, hey, there's some things where JetBlue needs to grow up. So those weren't any of the things that caused the problem. They just said, you know, if something else happens again, and you have not addressed some of these problems, it could get worse for you. What happened at that time exposed several vulnerabilities that would have developed into future problems. And we just really felt like we're at an age and stage now that we actually need to address those. And we didn't have confidence that David would be the best person to address them. So we did what any board of directors has to do, is choose the CEO of the company. David was not removed because of the Valentine's Day storm. In fact, all it did was expose some vulnerabilities we had. And when we did the internal review and an external review, we really thought it was time to make a change. I think a lot of people thought it might be over for JetBlue. We had so much negative press. But I think David's sincere apology, I think our customer bill of rights, I think the changes we made to handling IROPS, to addressing the overall situation with growing an airline rapidly, I think we quickly recovered our brand. So the major takeaways for me are to communicate. You almost can't over-communicate. A second one is there's an impact of any of these kinds of events on your brand. We had to really think about, you know, how do we make sure that customers trust us again? To me, the most important thing for managers is to remain calm, to listen, to be thoughtful, not to lose it, not to be frantic. You need to deal with it seriously. These are important events, but how you manage them, how you behave, will really be recalled long after the event.