Born in São Paulo, David Neeleman is the son of Gary Neeleman, a journalist and reporter for the North American news agency United Press International (UPI), who, at the time, was working in Brazil. When he was 7, Gary and family returned to their native city in the USA, Salt Lake City, Utah. There, the young David continued with his studies, “but my heart remained in Brazil”, as he has stated in several interviews.
Years later, at the age of 18, David returned to Brazil, this time as a Mormon missionary. When he arrived, he went to Rio de Janeiro where he began to preach his faith in the poorer districts and the shanty towns. Later on, he continued his mission in Recife, in the state of Pernambuco. Incidentally, his oldest son, Daniel, is currently on a preaching mission here in Brazil.
After two years, David returned to the USA. There, he began his professional career selling package tours to Hawaii along with some university colleagues. It was such a success that he was invited to work for Morris Travel, a travel agency in Salt Lake. With his enthusiasm and commercial acumen, he transformed the company from a simple travel agency into one of the largest leasers of jets, which he used to ship hundreds of people to Hawaii. He was soon bitten by the aviation “bug”. A short time later, he was operating aircraft, founding his first airline company, Morris Air. His rise was so rapid that, within a short while, the young company ended up being bought by Southwest, thanks to the efficiency of its operation and the innovation brought by Neeleman and his team. Amongst these innovations, Morris Air was the first airline company to do away with the use of printed air tickets, using the E-TKT system.
This was the first of many innovations David brought to the aviation industry. Another one, which our passengers will shortly be able to experience, is on-board live TV. It was David who first brought Live TV to commercial airplanes. The executive was also directly involved with Open Skies, a company designed to manage revenue, resource and reservations, using the internet. This program is being used as an alternative to the CRS (Computer Reservation Systems) system used to make airline reservations.
After the sale of Morris Air, Neeleman continued working for six months with Southwest and, after this, for contractual reasons, he was prohibited from working in any other North American airline company for five years. He then headed off to Calgary, in Canada, where he began to develop and apply his innovative ideas at WestJet. In a matter of just a few years, he transformed the company in yet another story of success: today, WestJet is the second biggest airline company in Canada.
Many of these ideas were to be applied later on in his next, more ingenious creation: JetBlue. The new company began its creation in 1999, based in New York, and had its first flight on February 11, 2000 to Fort Lauderdale. It was an instant success. It combined low prices with a high level of service quality. The following year, it was elected the “Best Domestic Airline” in the USA, a position which it has occupied ever since. From then on it has not stopped collecting awards. Today, its jet fleet consists of over 100 Airbus A320, 40 Embraer 190 with a further 160 of the latter model in the course of entering service. It serves 53 cities with 550 flights every day, and annual gross sales of 3 billion US dollars per year.
David Neeleman will continue at JetBlue as chairman, but in a non-executive role. This will allow him to dedicate the best part of his time to his new Brazilian enterprise. He will be calling on all his experience and passion for the sector to create a Brazilian airline with international class.