Jetblue’s Trans-Atlantic ambitions |

The plucky NYC airline is growing its trans-Atlantic footprint. JetBlue just added JFK-Amsterdam this week, with Boston to follow soon. It flies the right aircraft for the campaign. It has a good product. But is this enough? The North Atlantic market between the US and the EU is tough. The competitors are big and play rough. Ask Virgin Atlantic how British Airways welcomed them to the party. Although Virgin is still flying, it is now owned by Delta. The market history has dozens of airlines that tried and failed. Moreover, the airline business is an economy of scale business. The bigger the airline, the better it should be. Considering that, look at the network strategy map from Skailark for Jetblue from January through June 2023. The way to read this map is to consider each quadrant. The Y-axis ranks Cost Leadership. The higher the rank, the more the airline has cost leadership. The X-axis ranks Market Leadership. The higher the rank, the greater the market leadership. The size of the balls equals the amount of traffic on the route. In this quadrant, Jetblue shows few routes where it has cost leadership. In this quadrant, we see routes where Jetblue has cost and market leadership. This is the best place to be; an airline wants its best routes in this quadrant if possible. Jetblue has some large routes on the map that fall into this quadrant. This quadrant shows the toughest routes - low cost leadership and low market leadership. This is the opposite of Quadrant 2. Unfortunately, Jetblue has several big routes in this quadrant. The red arrow points to NYC-LON. The airline's flagship route is in the toughest quadrant. When the data is updated for the year, we expect NYC-AMS to be here, too. BOS-AMS might escape this quadrant. In this quadrant, we see routes where Jetblue has a relative market leadership. There are several large markets listed. It should be clear that JetBlue faces formidable challenges. It is a niche player in a very big pool. Can this work? Yes, there are examples of successful niche airlines making it work. There's one called La Compagnie - but that's one. To provide context, here is a table listing some metrics between NYC and London as a benchmark. Jetblue is in there and has the lowest costs. Jetblue does not have the feed and distribution of the competitors. The key advantage for Jetblue? Fuel burn - it operates the best aircraft for this market. Because their A321s are Pratt & Whitney powered, there are risks; Jetblue may make this work in Amsterdam as they do in London. It's early days, and like everyone else, we are eager to see just how much the brand can create a niche. Will the niche broaden enough to make the route sustainable? This is exactly what Maja Gedosev alluded to when speaking with Richard Schuurman, saying: "So far, in the UK, we have created around a thousand of loyal Mosaics, our top-tier customers who come back regularly to us to either New York and Boston or beyond. What we do best is basically watch our costs and make sure we provide the customer with the best product in service at an affordable fare. But we are not a low-cost airline; we are a value carrier.” Jetblue must accomplish the same level of customer attraction in Amsterdam. And they need to do this fast because they have not secured slots for the full year.

US Flight Planner - US DoT On-Time Data	Airbus vs Boeing - Official OEM Data
US Airline Schedule Performance - US DoT Data	Daily OEM Production & Deliveries -

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