I think many of us believed this was more or less JetBlue’s place in the market pre-Covid. I’m not sure anybody ever thought we were going to become a global powerhouse but we all expected (including management) to grow organically and to be a real national competitor and to be profitable by offering a better product than the large network carriers for a lower price. That reality changed drastically post Covid for all the reasons I think many on this forum are familiar with.
We play in some of the biggest sandboxes in the country in terms of operational cost that are consistently impacted by weather and ATC (the infamous unrelenting headwinds our leadership complains about every quarter). It makes it impossible to offer significantly better fares than larger carriers with large networks and ways to spread their cost and operation around and to do it profitably.
At some point we crossed a threshold where we are too big and our cost structure is way too high (not speaking of labor only, but the overall operational cost) to be a mom and pop operation. I think that’s why BlueDriver mentioned Breeze as being the airline you describe.
We cannot go backwards and shrink to become that airline anymore, but we also have no path to the growth we need to make our business model work outside of M&A. We are at critical mass here and I think it’s gotten to the point where even our managers, stakeholders, and most hard-core JetForward truthers understand this.